The Corridors of
Time
Something struck my face a tingling
blow.
“What’s happened? He’s dead. Are you
drugged?”
“Yes. Drugged.”
Someone else was speaking, and after a moment I knew who it was:
Severian, the young torturer.
But who was I?
“Get up. We’ve got to get
out.”
“Sentry.”
“Sentries,” the voice corrected us.
“There were three of them. We killed them.”
I was walking down a stair white as
salt, down to nenuphars and stagnant water. Beside me walked a
suntanned girl with long and slanting eyes. Over her shoulder
peered the sculptured face of one of the eponyms. The carver had
worked in jade; the effect was that of a face of
grass.
“Is he dying?”
“He sees us now. See his
eyes.”
I knew where I was. Soon the pitchman
would thrust his head through the doorway of the tent to tell me to
be gone. “Above ground,” I said. “You told me I would see her above
ground. But that was easy. She is here.”
“We must go.” The green man took my
left arm and Agia my right, and they led me out.
We walked a long way, just as I had envisioned
myself running, stepping sometimes over sleeping
Ascians.
“They keep little guard,” Agia
whispered. “Vodalus told me their leaders are so well obeyed they
can scarcely conceive of treacherous attack. In the war, our
soldiers surprise them often.”
I did not understand and repeated,
“‘Our soldiers …’” like a child.
“Hethor and I will no longer fight for
them. How could we, after we have seen them? My business is with
you.”
I was beginning to find myself again,
the minds that made up my mind all falling into place. I had been
told once that autarch meant “self-ruler,”
and I glimpsed the reason that title had come into being. I said,
“You
wanted to kill me. Now you are freeing me. You could have stabbed
me.” I saw a crooked dagger from Thrax quivering in Casdoe’s
shutter.
“I could have killed you more readily
than that. Hethor’s mirrors have given me a worm, no longer than
your hand, that glows with white fire. I have only to fling it, and
it kills and crawls back to me—one by one I slew the sentries so.
But this green man would not permit it, and I would not wish it.
Vodalus promised me your agony spread over weeks, and I will not
have less.”
“You’re taking me back to
him?”
She shook her head, and in the faint,
gray dawn light that had crept through the leaves I saw her brown
curls bounce on her shoulders as they had when I had watched her
raise the gratings outside the rag shop. “Vodalus is dead. With the
worm at my command, do you think I would let him cheat me and live?
They would have taken you away. Now I will let you go free—because
I have some inkling of where you will go—and in the end you will
come into my hands again, as you did when our pteriopes took you
from the evzones.”
“You are rescuing me because you hate
me then,” I said, and she nodded. Vodalus, I suppose, had hated
that part of me that had been the Autarch in the same
way.
Or rather, he had hated his conception
of the Autarch, for he had been loyal, in so far as he was capable
of it, to the real Autarch, whom he supposed his servant. When I
had been a boy in the kitchens of the House Absolute, there was a
cook who so despised the armigers and exultants for whom he
prepared food that, in order that he should never have to bear the
indignity of their reproaches, he did everything with a feverish
perfection. He was eventually made chief of the cooks of that wing.
I thought of him, and while I did, Agia’s touch on my arm, which
had become almost imperceptible as we hastened along, vanished
altogether. When I looked for her, she was gone; I was alone with
the green man.
“How did you come to be here?” I asked
him. “You nearly lost your life in these times, and I know you
cannot thrive under our sun.”
He smiled. Though his lips were green,
his teeth were white; they gleamed in the faint light. “We are your
children, and we are not less honest than you, though we do not
kill to eat. You gave me half your stone, the stone that gnawed the
iron and set me free. What did you think I would do when the chain
no longer bound me?”
“I supposed you would return to your
own day,” I said. The spell of the drug had faded sufficiently for
me to fear our talk would wake the Ascian soldiers. Yet I could see
none—only the dark, towering boles of the jungle
hardwoods.
“We requite our benefactors. I have
been running up and down the corridors of Time, seeking for a
moment in which you also were imprisoned, that I might free
you.”
When I heard that, I did not know what
to say. At last I told him, “You
cannot imagine how strange I feel now, knowing that someone has
been searching my future, looking for an opportunity to do me good.
But now, now that we are quits, surely you understand that I did
not help you because I believed you could help me.”
“You did—you desired my help in finding
the woman who just left us, the woman whom since that occasion you
have found several times. However, you ought to know that I was not
alone: There are others questing there—I shall send two of them to
you. And you and I are not yet at a balance, for although I found
you captive here, the woman found you also and would have freed you
without my help. So I shall see you again.”
As he said these words, he let go of my
arm and stepped in that direction I had never seen until I watched
the ship vanish into it from the top of Baldanders’s castle and
could only see, it seemed, when there was something there.
Immediately he turned and began to run, and despite the dimness of
the dawn sky I could see his running figure for a long time,
illuminated by intermittent but regular flashes. At last he faded
to a point of darkness; but then, just when I expected that point
to disappear utterly, it began to grow, so that I had the
impression of something huge rushing toward me down that strangely
angled tunnel.
It was not the ship I had seen but
another and much smaller one. Still, it was so large that when it
moved at last entirely into our field of consciousness, its
gunwales touched several of the thick trunks at once. The hull
dilated, and a pont, much shorter than the steps that had descended
from the Autarch’s flier, slid out to touch the
ground.
Down it came Master Malrubius and my
dog, Triskele.
At that moment I regained a command of
my personality that I had not truly possessed since I had drunk
alzabo with Vodalus and eaten Thecla’s flesh. It was not that
Thecla was gone (and indeed I could not wish her gone, though I
knew that in many respects she had been a cruel and foolish woman)
or that my predecessor and the hundred minds that had been
enveloped in his had vanished. The old, simple structure of my
single personality was no more; but the new, complex structure no
longer dazzled and bewildered me. It was a maze, but I was the
owner and even the builder of that maze, with the print of my thumb
on every passageway. Malrubius touched me, and then taking my
wondering hand in his laid it gently against his own cool
cheek.
“You are real, then,” I
said.
“No. We are almost what you think
us—powers from above the stage. Only not quite deities. You are an
actor, I believe.”
I shook my head. “Don’t you know me,
Master? You taught me when I was a boy, and I have become a
journeyman of the guild.”
“Yet you are an actor too. You have as
much right to think of yourself in that way as the other. You had
been performing when we spoke to you in the field near the Wall,
and the next time we saw you, at the House Absolute, you were
acting again. It was a good play; I should have liked to see the
end.”
“You were in our
audience?”
Master Malrubius nodded. “As an actor,
Severian, you surely know the phrase I hinted at a moment ago. It
refers to some supernatural force, personified and brought onto the
stage in the last act in order that the play may end well. None but
poor playwrights do it, they say, but those who say so forget that
it is better to have a power lowered on a rope, and a play that
ends well, than to have nothing, and a play that ends badly. Here
is our rope—many ropes, and a stout ship too. Will you come
aboard?”
I said, “Is that why you are as you
are? In order that I will trust you?”
“Yes, if you like.” Master Malrubius
nodded, and Triskele, who had been sitting at my feet and looking
up into my face, ran with his bumping, three-legged gallop halfway
up the pont and turned to look back at me, his stump tail wagging
and his eyes pleading as a dog’s eyes do.
“I know you can’t be what you seem.
Perhaps Triskele is, but I saw you buried, Master. Your face is no
mask, but there’s a mask somewhere, and under that mask you’re what
the common people call a cacogen, although Dr. Talos explained to
me once that you prefer to be called Hierodules.”
Again Malrubius laid his hand on mine.
“We would not deceive you if we could. But I hope that you will
deceive yourself, to your good and all Urth’s. Some drug now dulls
your mind—more than you realize—just as you were under the sway of
sleep when we spoke to you in that meadow near the Wall. If you
were undrugged now, perhaps you would lack the courage to come with
us, even if you saw us, even if your reason convinced you that you
should.”
I said, “So far it hasn’t convinced me
of that, or of anything else. Where do you want to take me, and why
do you want to take me there? Are you Master Malrubius or a
Hierodule?” As I spoke I became more conscious of the trees,
standing as soldiers stand while the officers of the staff discuss
some point of strategy. Night was upon us still, but it had become
a thinner darkness, even here.
“Do you know the meaning of that word
Hierodule you use? I am Malrubius, and no
Hierodule. Rather I serve those the Hierodules serve. Hierodule means holy slave. Do
you think there can be slaves without masters?”
“And you take me—”
“To Ocean, to preserve your life.” As
if he had read my thought, he continued, “No, we do not take you to
the paramours of Abaia, those who spared and succored you because
you had been a torturer and would be Autarch. In any event, you
have much worse to fear. Soon the slaves of Erebus, who held you
captive here, will discover you have escaped; and Erebus would hurl
that army, and many others like it, into the abyss to capture you.
Come.” He drew me onto the pont.