The Sand
Garden
That ship was worked by hands I could not see.
I had supposed we would float up as the flier had or vanish like
the green man down some corridor in time. Instead we rose so
quickly I felt sick; alongside I heard the crashing of great
limbs.
“You are the Autarch now,” Malrubius
told me. “Do you know it?” His voice seemed to blend with the
whistle of the wind in the rigging.
“Yes. My predecessor, whose mind is now
one of mine, came to office as I have. I know the secrets, the
words of authority, though I haven’t had time yet to think about
them. Are you returning me to the House Absolute?”
He shook his head. “You are not ready.
You believe that all the old Autarch knew is available to you now.
You are correct—but it is not yet in your grasp, and when the tests
come, you will encounter many who will slay you should you falter.
You were nurtured in the Citadel of Nessus—what are the words for
its castellan? How are the man-apes of the treasure mine to be
commanded? What phrases unlock the vaults of the Secret House? You
need not tell me, because these things are the arcana of your
state, and I know them in any case. But do you yourself know them,
without thinking long?”
The phrases I required were present in
my mind, yet I failed when I sought to pronounce them to myself.
Like little fish, they slipped aside, and in the end I could only
lift my shoulders.
“And there is one thing more for you to
do. One adventure more, beside the waters.”
“What is it?”
“If I were to tell you, it would not
come to pass. Do not be alarmed. It is a simple thing, over in a
breath. But I must explain a great deal, and I have not much time
in which to do it. Have you faith in the coming of the New
Sun?”
As I had looked within myself for the
words of command, so I looked within for my belief; and I could no
more find it than I had found them. “I have been taught so all my
life,” I said. “But by teachers—the true Malrubius was one—who I
think did not themselves believe. So I cannot now say whether I
believe or not.”
“Who is the New Sun? A man? If a man,
how can it be that every green thing is to grow darkly green again
at his coming, and the granaries full?”
It was unpleasant to be drawn back to
things half heard in childhood now, when I was just beginning to
understand that I had inherited the Commonwealth. I said, “He will
be the Conciliator come again—his avatar, bringing justice and
peace. In pictures he is shown with a shining face, like the sun. I
was an apprentice of the torturers, not an acolyte, and that is all
I can tell you.” I drew my cloak about me for shelter from the cold
wind. Triskele was huddled at my feet.
“And which does humanity need more?
Justice and peace? Or a New Sun?”
At that I tried to smile. “It has
occurred to me that though you cannot possibly be my old teacher,
you may incorporate his personality as I do the Chatelaine
Thecla’s. If that is so, you already know my answer. When a client
is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease
from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain
symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are
better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the
things they symbolize.”
“To a large extent you are correct. The
Master Malrubius you knew lives in me, and your old Triskele in
this Triskele. But that is not important now. If there is time, you
will understand before we go.” Malrubius closed his eyes and
scratched the gray hair on his chest, just as I remembered him
doing when I was among the youngest of the apprentices. “You were
afraid to board this little ship, even when I told you it would not
carry you away from Urth, or even to a continent other than your
own. Suppose I were to tell you—do not tell
you, but suppose I did—that it would in fact take you from Urth,
past the orbit of Phaleg, which you call Verthandi, past Bethor and
Aratron, and at last into the outer dark, and across the dark to
another place. Would you be frightened, now that you have sailed
with us?”
“No man enjoys saying he is afraid. But
yes, I would.”
“Afraid or not, would you go if it
might bring the New Sun?”
It seemed then that some icy spirit
from the gulf had already wrapped its hands about my heart. I was
not deceived, nor, I think, did he mean I should be. To answer yes
would be to undertake the journey. I hesitated, in silence except
for the roar of my own blood in my ears.
“You need not answer now if you cannot.
We will ask again. But I can tell you nothing more until you
answer.”
For a long time I stood on that strange
deck, sometimes walking up and down, blowing on my fingers in the
freezing wind while all my thoughts crowded around me. The stars
watched us, and it seemed to me that Master Malrubius’s eyes were
two more such stars.
At last I returned to him and said, “I
have long wanted … if it would bring the New Sun, I would
go.”
“I can give you no assurance. If it
might bring the New Sun, would you then?
Justice and peace, yes, but a New Sun—such an outpouring of
warmth and energy upon Urth as she knew before the birth of the
first man?”
Now came the strangest happening I have
to tell in all this already overlong tale; yet there was no sound
or sight associated with it, no speaking beast or gigantic woman.
It was only that as I heard him I felt a pressure against my
breastbone, as I had felt it in Thrax when I knew I should be going
north with the Claw. I remembered the girl in the jacal. “Yes,” I
said. “If it might bring the New Sun, I would go.”
“What if you were to stand trial there?
You knew him who was autarch before you, and in the end you loved
him. He lives in you. Was he a man?”
“He was a human being—as you, I think,
are not, Master.”
“That was not my question, as you know
as well as I. Was he a man as you are a man? Half the dyad of man
and woman?”
I shook my head.
“So you will become, should you fail
the trial. Will you still go?”
Triskele laid his scarred head against
my knee, the ambassador of all crippled things, of the Autarch who
had carried a tray in the House Absolute and lain paralyzed in the
palanquin waiting to pass to me the humming voices in his skull, of
Thecla writhing under the Revolutionary, and of the woman even I,
who had boasted I could forget nothing, had nearly forgotten,
bleeding and dying beneath our tower. Perhaps after all it was my
discovery of Triskele, which I have said changed nothing, that in
the end changed everything. I did not have to answer this time;
Master Malrubius saw my answer in my face.
“You know of the chasms of space, which
some call the Black Pits, from which no speck of matter or gleam of
light ever returns. But what you have not known until now is that
these chasms have their counterparts in White Fountains, from which
matter and energy rejected by a higher universe flow in endless
cataract into this one. If you pass—if our race is judged ready to
reenter the wide seas of space—such a white fountain will be
created in the heart of our sun.”
“But if I fail?”
“If you fail, your manhood will be
taken from you, so that you cannot bequeath the Phoenix Throne to
your descendants. Your predecessor also accepted the
challenge.”
“And failed. That is clear from what
you said.”
“Yes. Still, he was braver than many
who are called heroes, the first to go in many reigns. Ymar, of
whom you may have heard, was the last before him.”
“Yet Ymar too must have been judged
unfit. Are we going now? I can see only stars beyond the
rail.”
Master Malrubius shook his head. “You
are not looking as carefully as you think. We are already near our
destination.”
Swaying, I walked to the railing. Some
of my unsteadiness had its origin in the motion of the ship, I
think; but some, too, came from the lingering effects of the
drug.
Night still covered Urth, for we had
flown swiftly to the west, and the faint dawn that had come to the
Ascian army in the jungle had not yet appeared here. After a moment
I saw that the stars over the side seemed to slip, and slide in
their heaven, with an uneasy and wavering motion. Almost it seemed
that something moved among the stars as the wind moves through
wheat. Then I thought, It is the sea … and
at that moment Master Malrubius said, “It is that great sea called
Ocean.”
“I have longed to visit
it.”
“In a short time you will be standing
at its margin. You asked when you would leave this planet. Not
until your rule here is secure. When the city and the House
Absolute obey you and your armies have repelled the incursions of
the slaves of Erebus. Within a few years, perhaps. But perhaps not
for decades. We two will come for you.”
“You are the second tonight to tell me
I will see you again,” I said. Just as I spoke, there was a slight
shock, like the sensation one feels when a boat is brought
skillfully to the dock. I walked down the pont and out upon sand,
and Master Malrubius and Triskele followed me. I asked if they
would not stay with me for a time to counsel me.
“For a short time only. If you have
further questions, you must ask them now.”
The silver tongue of the pont was
already creeping back into the hull. It seemed that it had hardly
come home before the ship lifted itself and scudded down the same
aperture in reality into which the green man had run.
“You spoke of the peace and justice
that the New Sun is to bring. Is there justice in his calling me so
far? What is the test I must pass?”
“It is not he who calls you. Those who
call hope to summon the New Sun to them,” Master Malrubius said,
but I did not understand him. Then he recounted to me in brief
words the secret history of Time, which is the greatest of all
secrets, and which I will set down here in the proper place. When
he had finished, my mind reeled and I feared I would forget all he
had said, because it seemed too great a thing for any living man to
know, and because I had learned at last that the mists close for me
as for other men.
“You will not forget, you above all. At
Vodalus’s banquet, you said you felt sure you would forget the
foolish passwords he taught you in imitation of the words of
authority. But you did not. You will remember everything. Remember
too, not to be afraid. It may be that the epic penance of mankind
is at an end. The old Autarch told you the truth—we will not go to
the stars again until we go as a divinity, but that time may not be
far off now. In you all the divergent tendencies of our race may
have achieved synthesis.”
Triskele stood on his hind legs for a
moment as he used to, then spun around and galloped down the
starlit beach, three paws scattering the little cat’s-paw waves.
When he was a hundred strides off he turned and looked back at me,
as though he wished me to follow.
I took a few steps toward him, but
Master Malrubius said, “You cannot go where he is going, Severian.
I know you think us cacogens of a kind, and for a time I felt it
would not be wise to wholly undeceive you, but I must do
so now. We are aquastors, beings created and sustained by the power
of the imagination and the concentration of thought.”
“I have heard of such things,” I told
him. “But I have touched you.”
“That is no test. We are as solid as
most truly false things are—a dance of particles in space. Only the
things no one can touch are true, as you should know by now. Once
you met a woman named Cyriaca, who told you tales of the great
thinking machines of the past. There is such a machine on the ship
in which we sailed. It has the power to look into your
mind.”
I asked, “Are you that machine, then?”
A feeling of loneliness and vague fear grew in me.
“I am Master Malrubius, and Triskele is
Triskele. The machine looked among your memories and found us. Our
lives in your mind are not so complete as those of Thecla and the
old Autarch, but we are there nevertheless, and live while you
live. But we are maintained in the physical world by the energies
of the machine, and its range is but a few thousand
years.”
As he spoke these final words, his
flesh was already fading into bright dust. For a moment it glinted
in the cold starlight. Then it was gone. Triskele remained with me
a few breaths longer, and when his yellow coat was already silvered
and blowing away in the gentle breeze, I heard his
bark.
Then I stood alone at the edge of the
sea I had longed for so often; but though I was alone, I found it
cheering, and breathed the air that is like no other, and smiled to
hear the soft song of the little waves. Land—Nessus, the House
Absolute, and all the rest—lay to the east; west lay the sea; I
walked north because I was reluctant to leave it too soon, and
because Triskele had run in that direction, along the margin of the
sea. There great Abaia might wallow with his women, yet the sea was
older far, and wiser than he; we human beings, like all the life of
the land, had come from the sea; and because we could not conquer
it, it was ours always. The old, red sun rose on my right and
touched the waves with his fading beauty, and I heard the calling
of the sea birds, the innumerable birds.
By the time the shadows were short, I was
tired. My face and my wounded leg pained me; I had not eaten since
noon of the previous day and had not slept save for my trance in
the Ascian tent. I would have rested if I could, but the sun was
warm, and the line of cliffs beyond the beach offered no shade. At
last I followed the tracks of a two-wheeled cart and came to a
clump of wild roses growing from a dune. There I halted, and seated
myself in their shadow to take off my boots and pour out the sand
that had entered their splitting seams.
A thorn caught my forearm and broke
from its branch, remaining embedded in my skin, with a scarlet drop
of blood, no bigger than a grain of millet, at its tip. I plucked
it out—then fell to my knees.
It was the Claw.
The Claw perfect, shining black, just
as I had placed it under the altar stone of the Pelerines. All that
bush and all the other bushes growing with it
were covered with white blossoms and these perfect Claws. The one
in my palm flamed with transplendent light as I looked at
it.
I had surrendered the Claw, but I had
retained the little leather sack Dorcas had sewn for it. I took it
from my sabretache and hung it about my neck in the old way, with
the Claw once more inside. It was only when I had thus put it away
that I recalled seeing just such a bush in the Botanic Gardens at
the beginning of my journey.
No one can explain such things. Since I have
come to the House Absolute, I have talked with the heptarch and
with various acaryas; but they have been able to tell me very
little save that the Increate has chosen before this to manifest
himself in these plants.
At that time I did not think of it, being
filled with wonder—but may it not be that we were guided to the
unfinished Sand Garden? I carried the Claw even then, though I did
not know it; Agia had already slipped it under the closure of my
sabretache. Might it not be that we came to the unfinished garden
so that the Claw, flying as it were against the wind of Time, might
make its farewell? The idea is absurd. But then, all ideas are
absurd.
What struck me on the beach and it
struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the
Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried
about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the
new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then
it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in
everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in
the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred
Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a
beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the
sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator.
But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator,
because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a
relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had
traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might
not walk shod on holy ground.