Autarch of the
Commonwealth
By the middle of the day, we had again passed
all those whom we had passed the afternoon before and came upon the
baggage train. I think all of us were amazed to discover that the
enormous force we had seen was no more than the rear guard of an
army inconceivably greater.
The Ascians used uintathers and
platybelodons as beasts of burden. Mixed with them were machines
with six legs, machines apparently built to serve that purpose. So
far as I could see, the drivers made no distinction between these
devices and the animals; if a beast lay down and could not be made
to rise again, or a machine fell and did not right itself, its load
was distributed among those nearest to hand, and it was abandoned.
There appeared to be no effort to slaughter the beasts for their
meat or to repair or take parts from the machines.
Late in the afternoon some great
excitement passed down our column, though neither I nor my guards
could discover what it was. Vodalus himself and several of his
lieutenants came hurrying by, and afterward there was much coming
and going between the end of the column and its head. When dark
came we did not camp, but continued to tramp through the night with
the Ascians. Torches were passed back to us, and since I had no
weapons to carry and was somewhat stronger than I had been, I
carried them, feeling almost as though I commanded the six swords
who surrounded me.
About midnight, as nearly as I could
judge, we halted. My guards found sticks for a fire, which we
kindled from a torch. Just as we were about to lie down, I saw a
messenger rouse the palanquin bearers ahead of us and send them
blundering forward in the dark. They were no sooner gone than he
loped back to us and held a quick, whispered conversation with the
sergeant of my guards. At once my hands were bound (as they had not
been since Vodalus had cut them free) and we were hurrying after
the palanquin. We passed the head of the column, marked by the
Chatelaine Thea’s little pavilion, without pausing, and were soon
wandering among the myriad Ascian soldiers of the main
body.
Their headquarters was a dome of metal.
I suppose it must have folded or collapsed in some way as a tent
does, but it appeared as permanent and solid as any building, black
externally but glowing with a sourceless, pale light within when
the side opened to admit us. Vodalus was there, stiff and
deferential; beside him the palanquin stood with its curtains
opened to show the immobile body of the Autarch. At the center of
the dome, three women sat around a low table. Neither then nor
later did they look at Vodalus, or the Autarch in his palanquin, or
at me when I was brought forward, save for an occasional glance.
There were stacks of papers before them, but they did not look at
those at all—only at one another. In appearance they were much like
the other Ascians I had seen, save that their eyes were saner and
they were less starved looking.
“Here he is,” Vodalus said. “Now you
see them both before you.”
One of the Ascians spoke to the other
two in their own tongue. Both nodded and the one who had spoken
said, “Only he who acts against the populace need hide his
face.”
There was a lengthy pause, then Vodalus
hissed at me, “Answer her!”
“Answer what? There has been no
question.”
The Ascian said, “Who is the friend of
the populace? He who aids the populace. Who is the enemy of the
populace?”
Speaking very rapidly, Vodalus asked,
“To the best of your knowledge are you, or is this unconscious man
here, the leader of the peoples of the southern half of this
hemisphere?”
“No,” I said. It was an easy lie, since
from what I had seen, the Autarch was the leader of very few in the
Commonwealth. To Vodalus I added under my breath, “What kind of
foolishness is this? Do they believe I would tell them if I were
the Autarch?”
“All we say is being transmitted to the
north.”
One of the Ascians who had not spoken
previously spoke now. Once she gestured in our direction. When she
was finished, all three sat deathly still. I had the impression
that they heard some voice inaudible to me, and that they did not
dare move while it spoke; but that may have been mere imagination
on my part. Vodalus fidgeted, I shifted my position to put a little
less weight on my injured leg, and the Autarch’s narrow chest
heaved to the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, but the three of
them remained as immobile as figures in a painting.
At last the one who had spoken first
said, “All persons belong to the populace.” At that the others
seemed to relax.
“This man is ill,” Vodalus said,
looking toward the Autarch, “and he has been a useful servant to
me, though I suppose his usefulness is now ended. The other I have
promised to one of my followers.”
“The merit of sacrifice falls on him
who without thought to his own convenience offers what he has
toward the service of the populace.” The Ascian woman’s tone made
it clear that no further argument was possible.
Vodalus looked toward me and shrugged,
then turned on his heel and
strode out of the dome. Almost at once a file of Ascian officers
entered carrying lashes.
We were imprisoned in an Ascian tent perhaps
twice the size of my cell in the ziggurat. There was a fire there
but no bedding, and the officers who had carried in the Autarch had
merely dropped him on the ground beside it. After working my hands
free, I tried to make him comfortable, turning him over on his back
as he had been in the palanquin and arranging his arms at his
sides.
About us the army lay quiet, or at
least as quiet as an Ascian army ever is. From time to time someone
far off cried out—in sleep, it seemed—but for the most part there
was no sound but the slow pacing of the sentries outside. I cannot
express the horror that the thought of going north to Ascia evoked
in me then. To see only the Ascians’ wild, starved faces and to
encounter myself, no doubt for the remainder of my life, whatever
it was that had driven them mad, seemed to me a more horrible fate
than any the clients in the Matachin Tower were ever forced to
endure. I tried to lift the skirt of the tent, thinking that the
sentries could do nothing worse than take my life; but the edges
were welded to the ground by some means I did not understand. All
four walls were of a slick, tough substance I could not tear, and
Miles’s razor had been taken from me by my six female guards. I was
about to rush out the door when the Autarch’s well-remembered voice
whispered, “Wait.” I dropped to my knees beside him, suddenly
afraid we would be overheard.
“I thought you
were—sleeping.”
“I suppose I have been in a coma most
of the time. But when I was not, I feigned, so Vodalus would not
question me. Are you going to escape?”
“Not without you, Sieur. Not now. I had
given you up for dead.”
“You were not far wrong … certainly not
by so much as a day. Yes, I think that is best, you must escape.
Father Inire is with the insurgents. He was to bring you what is
necessary, then help you get away. But we are no longer there … are
we? He may not be able to aid you. Open my robe. What you first
require is thrust into my waistband.”
I did as he asked; the flesh my fingers
brushed was as cold as a corpse’s. Near his left hip I saw a hilt
of silvery metal no thicker than a woman’s finger. I drew the
weapon forth; the blade was not half a span in length, but thick
and strong, and of that deadly sharpness I had not felt since
Baldanders’s mace had shattered Terminus
Est.
“You must not go yet,” the Autarch
whispered.
“I will not leave you while you live,”
I said. “Do you doubt me?”
“We will both live, and both go. You
know the abomination …” His hand closed on mine. “The eating of the
dead, to devour their dead lives. But there is another way you do
not know, and another drug. You must take it, and swallow the
living cells of my forebrain.”
I must have drawn away, for his hand
gripped my own harder.
“When you lie with a woman, you thrust
your life into hers so that perhaps there will be new life. When
you do as I have commanded you, my life and the lives of all those
who live in me will be continued in you. The cells will enter your
own nervous system and multiply there. The drug is in the vial I
wear at my neck, and that blade will split the bones of my skull
like pine. I have had occasion to use it, and I promise it. Do you
recall how you swore to serve me when I shut the book? Use the
knife now, and go as quickly as you can.”
I nodded and promised I
would.
“The drug will be stronger than any you
have known, and though all but mine will be faint, there will be
hundreds of personalities … . We are many lives.”
“I understand,” I said.
“The Ascians march at dawn. Can there
be more than a single watch remaining of the night?”
“I hope that you will live it out,
Sieur, and many more. That you’ll recover.”
“You must kill me now, before Urth
turns to face the sun. Then I will live in you … never die. I live
by mere volition now. I am relinquishing my life as I
speak.”
To my utter surprise, my eyes were
streaming with tears. “I’ve hated you since I was a boy, Sieur.
I’ve done you no harm, but I would have harmed you if I could, and
now I’m sorry.”
His voice had faded until it was softer
than the chirping of a cricket. “You were right to hate me,
Severian. I stand … as you will stand … for so much that is
wrong.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why?” I was on my knees beside him.
“Because all else is worse. Until the
New Sun comes, we have but a choice of evils. All have been tried,
and all have failed. Goods in common, the rule of the people …
everything. You wish for progress? The Ascians have it. They are
deafened by it, crazed by the death of Nature till they are ready
to accept Erebus and the rest as gods. We hold humankind stationary
… in barbarism. The Autarch protects the people from the exultants,
and the exultants … shelter them from the Autarch. The religious
comfort them. We have closed the roads to paralyze the social order
… .”
His eyes fell shut. I put my hand upon
his chest to feel the faint stirring of his heart.
“Until the New Sun …”
This was what I had sought to escape,
not Agia or Vodalus or the Ascians. As gently as I could, I lifted
the chain from his neck, unstoppered the vial and swallowed the
drug. Then with that short, stiff blade I did what had to be
done.
When it was over, I covered him from head to
toe with his own saffron robe and hung the empty vial about my own
neck. The effect of the drug was as violent as he had warned me it
would be. You that read this, who have
never, perhaps, possessed more than a single consciousness, cannot
know what it is to have two or three, much less hundreds. They
lived in me and were joyful, each in his own way, to find they had
new life. The dead Autarch, whose face I had seen in scarlet ruin a
few moments before, now lived again. My eyes and hands were his, I
knew the work of the hives of the bees of the House Absolute and
the sacredness of them, who steer by the sun and fetch gold of
Urth’s fertility. I knew his course to the Phoenix Throne, and to
the stars, and back. His mind was mine and filled mine with lore
whose existence I had never suspected and with the knowledge other
minds had brought to his. The phenomenal world seemed dim and vague
as a picture sketched in sand over which an errant wind veered and
moaned. I could not have concentrated on it if I had wished to, and
I had no such wish.
The black fabric of our prison tent
faded to a pale dove-gray, and the angles of its top whirled like
the prisms of a kaleidoscope. I had fallen without being aware of
it and lay near the body of my predecessor, where my attempts to
rise resulted in nothing more than the beating of my hands upon the
ground.
How long I lay there I do not know. I
had wiped the knife—now, still, my knife—and
concealed it as he had. I could vividly picture a self of dozens of
superposed images slitting the wall and slipping out into the
night. Severian, Thecla, myriad others all escaping. So real was
the thought that I often believed I had done it; but always, when I
ought to have been running between the trees, avoiding the
exhausted sleepers of the army of the Ascians, I found myself
instead in the familiar tent, with the draped body not far from my
own.
Hands clasped mine. I supposed that the
officers had returned with their lashes, and tried to see and to
rise so I would not be struck. But a hundred random memories
intruded themselves like the pictures the owner holds up to us in
rapid succession in a cheap gallery: a footrace, the towering pipes
of an organ, a diagram with labeled angles, a woman riding in a
cart.
Someone said, “Are you all right?
What’s happened to you?” I felt the spittle dribbling from my lips,
but no words came.