The Citadel of the
Autarch
Though every league that separated me from
Dorcas tore my heart, it was better than I can tell you to be back
on the Samru again after seeing the empty,
silent south.
Her decks were of the impure but lovely
white of new-cut wood, scrubbed daily with a great mat called a
bear—a sort of scouring pad woven from old
cordage and weighed with the gross bodies of our two cooks, whom
the crew had to drag over the last span of planking before
breakfast. The crevices between the planks were sealed with pitch,
so that the decks seemed terraces paved in a bold, fantastic
design.
She was high in the bow, with a stem
that curled back upon her. Eyes, each with a pupil as big as a
plate and a sky-blue iris of the brightest obtainable paint, stared
out across the green waters to help find her way; her left eye wept
the anchor.
Forward of her stem, held there by a
triangular wooden brace itself carved, pierced, gilded, and
painted, was her figurehead, the bird of immortality. Its head was
a woman’s, the face long and aristocratic, the eyes tiny and black,
its expressionlessness a magnificent commentary on the somber
tranquillity of those who will never know death. Painted wooden
feathers grew from its wooden scalp to clothe its shoulders and cup
its hemispherical breasts; its arms were wings lifted up and back,
their tips reaching higher than the termination of the stem and
their gold and crimson primary feathers partially obscuring the
triangular brace. I would have thought it a creature wholly
fabulous—as no doubt the sailors did—had I not seen the Autarch’s
anpiels.
A long bowsprit passed to starboard of
the stem, between the wings of the samru. The foremast, only
slightly longer than this bowsprit, rose from the forecastle. It
was raked forward to give the foresail room, as though it had been
pulled out of true by the forestay and the laboring jib. The
mainmast stood as straight as the pine it had once been, but the
mizzenmast was raked back, so the mastheads of the three masts were
considerably more separated than their bases. Each mast held a
slanting yard made by lashing together two tapering spars that had
once been entire saplings, and each of these yards carried a
single, triangular, rust-colored sail.
The hull itself was painted white below
the water and black above it, save for the figurehead and eyes I
have already mentioned, and the quarterdeck rail, where scarlet had
been used to symbolize both the captain’s high state and his
sanguinary background. This quarterdeck actually occupied no more
than a sixth of the Samru’s length, but the
wheel and the binnacle were there, and it was there that one had
the finest view, short of that provided by the rigging. The ship’s
only real armament, a swivel gun not much larger than Mamillian’s,
was there, ready alike for freebooters and mutineers. Just aft of
the sternrail, two iron posts as delicately curved as the horns of
a cricket lifted many-faceted lanterns, one of palest red, the
other viridescent as moonlight.
I was standing by these lanterns the
next evening, listening to the thudding of the drum, the soft
splashing of the sweep-blades, and the rowers’ chant, when I saw
the first lights along the riverbank. Here was the dying edge of
the city, the home of the poorest of the poorest of the poor—which
only meant that the living edge of the city was here, that death’s
dominion ended here. Human beings were preparing to sleep here,
perhaps still sharing the meal that marked the day’s end. I saw a
thousand kindnesses in each of those lights, and heard a thousand
fireside stories. In some sense I was home again; and the same song
that had urged me forth in the spring now bore me
back:
Row, brothers, row!
The current is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
Row, brothers, row!
The wind is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
The current is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
Row, brothers, row!
The wind is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
I could not help but wonder who was setting
out that night.
Every long story, if it be told truly,
will be found to contain all the elements that have contributed to
the human drama since the first rude ship reached the strand of
Lune: not only noble deeds and tender emotion, but grotesquerie,
bathos, and so on. I have striven to set down the unembellished
truth here, without the least worry that you, my reader, would find
some parts improbable and others insipid; and if the mountain war
was the scene of high deeds (belonging more to others than to me),
and my imprisonment by Vodalus and the Ascians a time of horror,
and my passage on the Samru an interlude of
tranquillity, then we are come to the interval of
comedy.
We approached that part of the city
where the Citadel stands—which is southern but not the
southernmost—under sail and by day. I watched the sun-gilt eastern
bank with great care, and had the captain land me on those slimy
steps where I had once swum and fought. I hoped to pass through the
necropolis gate and so enter the Citadel through the breach in the
curtain wall that was near the Matachin Tower; but the gate was
closed and locked, and no convenient party of volunteers arrived to
admit me. Thus I was forced instead to walk many chains along the
margin of the necropolis, and several more along the curtain wall
to the barbican.
There I encountered a numerous guard
who carried me before their officer, who, when I told him I was a
torturer, supposed me to be one of those wretches that, most often
at the onset of winter, seek to gain admission to the guild. He
decided (very properly, had he been correct) to have me whipped;
and to prevent it I was forced to break the thumbs of two of his
men, and then demand while I held him in the way called the
kitten and ball that he take me to his
superior, the castellan.
I admit I was somewhat awed at the
thought of this official, whom I had seldom so much as seen in all
the years I had been an apprentice in the fortress he commanded. I
found him an old soldier, silver-haired and as lame as I. The
officer stammered out his accusations while I stood by: I had
assaulted and insulted (not true) his person, maimed two of his
men, and so on. When he had finished, the castellan looked from me
to him and back again, dismissed him, and offered me a
seat.
“You are unarmed,” he said. His voice
was hoarse but soft, as though he had strained it shouting
commands.
I admitted that I was.
“But you have seen fighting, and you
have been in the jungle north of the mountains, where no battle has
been since they turned our flank by crossing the
Uroboros.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But how can you
know?”
“That wound in your thigh came from one
of their spears. I’ve seen enough to recognize them. The beam
flashed up through the muscle, reflected by the bone. You might
have been up a tree and been stuck by a hastarus on the ground, I
suppose, but the most likely thing is that you were mounted and
charging infantry. Not a cataphract, or they wouldn’t have got you
so easily. The demilances?”
“Only the light
irregulars.”
“You’ll have to tell me about that
later, because you’re a city man from your accent, and they’re
eclectics and suchlike for the most part. You have a double scar on
your foot too, white and clean, with the marks half a span apart.
That was a blood bat’s bite, and they don’t come that large except
in the true jungle at the waist of the world. How did you get
there?”
“Our flier crashed. I was taken
prisoner.”
“And escaped?”
In a moment more I would have been
forced to talk of Agia and the green man, and of my journey from
the jungle to the mouth of Gyoll, and those were high matters which
I did not wish to disclose thus casually. Instead of an answer, I
pronounced the words of authority applicable to the Citadel and its
castellan.
Because he was lame, I would have had
him remain seated if I could; but
he sprang to his feet and saluted, then dropped to his knees to
kiss my hand. He was thus, though he could not have known it, the
first to pay me homage, a distinction that entitles him to a
private audience once a year—an audience he has not yet requested
and perhaps never will.
For me to proceed now, clothed as I
was, was impossible. The old castellan would have died of a stroke
had I demanded it, and he was so concerned for my safety that any
incognito would have been accompanied by at least a platoon of
lurking halberdiers. I soon found myself arrayed in lapis lazuli
jazerant, cothurni, and a stephane, the whole set off by an ebony
baculus and a voluminous damassin cape embroidered with rotting
pearls. All these things were indescribably ancient, having been
taken from a store preserved from the period when the Citadel was
the residence of the autarchs.
Thus in place of entering our tower, as
I had intended, in the same cloak in which I had left it, I
returned as an unrecognizable being in ceremonial fancy dress,
skeletally thin, lame, and hideously scarred. It was with this
appearance that I entered Master Palaemon’s study, and I am certain
I must almost have frightened him to death, since he had been told
only a few moments before that the Autarch was in the Citadel and
wished to converse with him.
He seemed to me to have aged a great
deal while I was gone. Perhaps it was simply that I recalled him
not as he was when I was exiled, but as I had seen him in our
little classroom when I was a boy. Still, I like to think he was
concerned for me, and it is not really so unlikely that he was: I
had always been his best pupil and his favorite; it was his vote,
beyond doubt, that had countered Master Gurloes’s and saved my
life; he had given me his sword.
But whether he had worried much or
little, his face seemed more deeply lined than it had been; and his
scant hair, which I had thought gray, was now of that yellow hue
seen in old ivory. He knelt and kissed my fingers, and was more
than a little surprised when I helped him to rise and told him to
seat himself behind his table again.
“You are too kind, Autarch,” he said.
Then, using an old formula, “Your mercy extends from sun to
Sun.”
“Do you not recall us?”
“Were you confined here?” He peered at
me through the curious arrangement of lenses that alone permitted
him to see at all, and I decided that his vision, exhausted long
before I was born on the faded ink of the records of the guild,
must have deteriorated further. “You have suffered torment, I see.
But it is too crude, I hope, for our work.”
“It was not your doing,” I said,
touching the scars on my cheek. “Nevertheless, we were confined for
a time in the oubliette beneath this tower.”
He sighed—an old man’s shallow
breath—and looked down at the gray litter of his papers. When he
spoke I could not hear the words, and had to ask him to repeat
them.
“It has come,” he said. “I knew it
would, but I hoped to be dead and forgotten. Will you dismiss us,
Autarch? Or put us to some other task?”
“We have not yet decided what we will
do with you and the guild you serve.”
“It will not avail. If I offend you,
Autarch, I ask your indulgence for my age … but still it will not
avail. You will find in the end that you require men to do what we
do. You may call it healing, if you wish. That has been done often.
Or ritual, that has been done too. But you will find the thing
itself grows more terrible in its disguise. Will you imprison those
undeserving of death? You will find them a mighty army in chains.
You will discover that you hold prisoners whose escape would be a
catastrophe, and that you need servants who will wreak justice on
those who have caused scores to die in agony. Who else will do
that?”
“No one will wreak such justice as you.
You say our mercy extends from sun to Sun, and we hope it is so. By
our mercy we will grant even the foulest a quick death. Not because
we pity them, but because it is intolerable that good men should
spend a lifetime dispensing pain.”
His head came up and the lenses
flashed. For the only time in all the years I had known him, I was
able to see the youth he had been. “It must be done by good men.
You are badly advised, Autarch! What is intolerable is that it
should be done by bad men.”
I smiled. His face, as I had seen it
then, had recalled something I had thrust from my mind months
before. It was that this guild was my family, and all the home I
should ever have. I would never find a friend in the world if I
could not find friends here. “Between us, Master,” I told him, “we
have decided it should not be done at all.”
He did not reply, and I saw from his
expression that he had not even heard what I had said. He had been
listening instead to my voice, and doubt and joy flickered over his
worn, old face like shadow and firelight.
“Yes,” I said. “It is Severian,” and
while he was struggling to regain possession of himself, I went to
the door and got my sabretache, which I had ordered one of the
officers of my guard to bring. I had wrapped it in what had been my
fuligin guild cloak, now faded to mere rusty black. Spreading the
cloak over Master Palaemon’s table, I opened the sabretache and
poured out its contents. “This is all we have brought back,” I
said.
He smiled as he used to in the
schoolroom when he had caught me out in some minor matter. “That
and the throne? Will you tell me about it?”
And so I did. It took a long while, and
more than once my protectors rapped at the door to ascertain that I
was unharmed, and at last I had a meal brought in to us; and when
the pheasant was mere bones and the cakes were eaten and the wine
drunk, we were still talking. It was then that I conceived the idea
that has at last borne fruit in this record of my life. I had
originally intended to begin it at the day I left our tower and to
end it when I returned. But I soon saw that though such a
construction would indeed supply the symmetry so valued by artists,
it would be impossible for anyone to understand my adventures
without knowing something of my adolescence. In the same way, some
elements of my story would remain incomplete if I did not
extend it (as I propose to do) a few days beyond my return. Perhaps
I have contrived for someone The Book of
Gold. Indeed, it may be that all my wanderings have been no
more than a contrivance of the librarians to recruit their numbers;
but perhaps even that is too much to hope.