Of Bad Gold and
Burning
Not much remains to be told. I knew I would
have to leave the city in a few days, so all I hoped to do here
would have to be done quickly. I had no friends in the guild I
could be sure of beyond Master Palaemon, and he would be of little
use in what I planned. I summoned Roche, knowing that he could not
deceive me to my face for long. (I expected to see a man older than
myself, but the red-haired journeyman who came at my command was
hardly more than a boy; when he had gone, I studied my own face in
a mirror, something I had not done before.)
He told me that he and several others
who had been friends of mine more or less close had argued against
my execution when the will of most of the guild was to kill me, and
I believed him. He also admitted quite freely that he had proposed
that I be maimed and expelled, though he said he had only done so
because he had felt it to be the only way to save my life. I think
he expected to be punished in some way—his cheeks and forehead,
normally so ruddy, were white enough to make his freckles stand out
like splatters of paint. His voice was steady, however, and he said
nothing that seemed intended to excuse himself by throwing blame on
someone else.
The fact was, of course, that I did
intend to punish him, together with the rest of the guild. Not
because I bore him or them any ill will, but because I felt that
being locked below the tower for a time would arouse in them a
sensitivity to that principle of justice of which Master Palaemon
had spoken, and because it would be the best way to assure that the
order forbidding torture I intended to issue would be carried out.
Those who spend a few months in dread of that art are not likely to
resent its being discontinued.
However, I said nothing about that to
Roche but only asked him to bring me a journyman’s habit that
evening, and to be ready with Drotte and Eata to aid me the next
morning.
He returned with the clothing just
after vespers. It was an indescribable pleasure to take off the
stiff costume I had been wearing and put on fuligin again. By
night, its dark embrace is the nearest approach to invisibility I
know, and after I had slipped out of my chambers by one of the
secret exits,
I moved between tower and tower like a shadow until I reached the
fallen section of the curtain wall.
Day had been warm; but the night was
cool, and the necropolis filled with mist, just as it had been when
I had come from behind the monument to save Vodalus. The mausoleum
where I had played as a boy stood as I had left it, its jammed door
three-quarters shut.
I had brought a candle, and I lit it
when I was inside. The funeral brasses I had once kept polished
were green again; drifted leaves lay uncrushed everywhere. A tree
had flung a slender limb through the little, barred
window.
Where I put you, there you
lie,
Never let a stranger spy,
Like grass grow to any eye,
Not of me.
Here be safe, never leave it,
Should a hand come, deceive it,
Let strange eyes not believe it,
Till I see.
Never let a stranger spy,
Like grass grow to any eye,
Not of me.
Here be safe, never leave it,
Should a hand come, deceive it,
Let strange eyes not believe it,
Till I see.
The stone was smaller and lighter than
I remembered. The coin beneath it had grown dull with damp; but it
was still there, and in a moment I held it again and recalled the
boy I had been, walking shaken back to the torn wall through the
fog.
Now I must ask you, you that have
pardoned so many deviations and digressions from me, to excuse one
more. It is the last.
A few days ago (which is to say, a long
time after the real termination of the events I have set myself to
narrate) I was told that a vagabond had come here to the House
Absolute saying that he owed me money, and that he refused to pay
it to anyone else. I suspected that I was about to see some old
acquaintance, and told the chamberlain to bring him to
me.
It was Dr. Talos. He appeared to be in
funds, and he had dressed himself for the occasion in a capot of
red velvet and a chechia of the same material. His face was still
that of a stuffed fox; but it seemed to me at times that some hint
of life crept into it, that something or someone now peered through
the glass eyes.
“You have bettered yourself,” he said,
making such a low bow that the tassel of his cap swept the carpet.
“You may recall that I invariably affirmed you would. Honesty,
integrity, and intelligence cannot be kept down.”
“We both know that nothing is easier to
keep down,” I said. “By my old guild, they were kept down every
day. But it is good to see you again, even if you come as the
emissary of your master.”
For a moment the doctor looked blank.
“Oh, Baldanders, you mean. No, he has dismissed me, I’m afraid.
After the fight. After he dived into the lake.”
“You believe he survived,
then.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure he survived. You
didn’t know him as I did, Severian. Breathing water would be
nothing to him. Nothing! He had a marvelous mind. He was a supreme
genius of a unique sort: everything turned inward. He combined the
objectivity of the scholar with the self-absorption of the
mystic.”
I said, “By which you mean he carried
out experiments on himself.”
“Oh, no, not at all. He reversed that!
Others experiment upon themselves in order to derive some rule they
can apply to the world. Baldanders experimented on the world and
spent the proceeds, if I can put it so bluntly, upon his person.
They say—” here he looked about nervously to make sure no one but
myself was in earshot “—they say I’m a monster, and so I am. But
Baldanders was more monster than I. In some sense he was my father,
but he had built himself. It’s the law of nature, and of what is
higher than nature, that each creature must have a creator. But
Baldanders was his own creation; he stood behind himself, and cut
himself off from the line linking the rest of us with the Increate.
However, I stray from my subject.” The doctor had a wallet of
scarlet leather at his belt; he loosened the strings and began to
rummage in it. I heard the chink of metal.
“Do you carry money now?” I asked. “You
used to give everything to him.”
His voice sank until I could hardly
hear it. “Wouldn’t you, in my present position, do the same thing?
Now I leave coins, little stacks of aes and orichalks, near water.”
He spoke more loudly: “It does no harm, and reminds me of the great
days. But I am honest, you see! He always demanded that of me. And
he was honest too, after his fashion. Anyway, do you recall the
morning before we came out the gate? I was handing round the
receipts from the night before, and we were interrupted. There was
a coin left, and it was to go to you. I saved it and meant to give
it to you later, but I forgot, and then when you came to the castle
… .” He gave me a sidelong glance. “But fair trade ends paid, as
they say, and I have it here.”
The coin was precisely like the one I
had taken from under the stone.
“You see now why I couldn’t give it to
your man—I’m sure he thought me mad.”
I flipped the coin and caught it. It
felt as though it had been lightly greased. “To tell the truth,
Doctor, we don’t.”
“Because it’s false, of course. I told
you so that morning. How could I have told him I had come to pay
the Autarch, and then given him a bad coin? They’re terrified of
you, and they’d have disemboweled me looking for a good one! Is it
true you’ve an explosive that takes days to go up, so you can blow
people apart slowly?”
I was looking at the two coins. They
had the same brassy shine and appeared to have been struck in the
same die.
But that little interview, as I have said,
took place a long time after the proper close of my narrative. I
returned to my chambers in the Flag Tower
by the way I had come, and when I reached them again, took off the
dripping cloak and hung it up. Master Gurloes used to say that not
wearing a shirt was the hardest thing about belonging to the guild.
Though he meant it ironically, it was in some sense true. I, who
had gone through the mountains with a naked chest, had been
softened sufficiently by a few days in the stifling autarchial
vestments to shiver at a foggy autumn night.
There were fireplaces in all the rooms,
and each was piled with wood so old and dry that I suspected it
would fall to dust should I strike it against an andiron. I had
never lit any of these fires; but I decided to do so now, and warm
myself, and spread the clothes Roche had brought over the back of a
chair to dry. When I looked for my firebox, however, I discovered
that in my excitement I had left it in the mausoleum with the
candle. Thinking vaguely that the autarch who had inhabited these
rooms before me (a ruler far beyond the reach of my memory) must
surely have kept some means of kindling his numerous fires close to
hand, I began searching the drawers of the cabinets.
These were largely filled with the
papers that had so fascinated me before; but instead of stopping to
read them, as I had when I had made my original survey of the
rooms, I lifted them from each drawer to see if there was not a
steel, igniter, or syringe of amadou beneath them.
I found none; but instead, in the
largest drawer of the largest cabinet, concealed under a filigree
pen case, I discovered a small pistol.
I had seen such weapons before—the
first time having been when Vodalus had given me the false coin I
had just reclaimed. Yet I had never held one in my own hands, and I
found now that it was a very different thing from seeing them in
the hands of others. Once when Dorcas and I were riding north
toward Thrax we had fallen in with a caravan of tinkers and
peddlers. We still had most of the money Dr. Talos had shared out
when we met him in the forest north of the House Absolute; but we
were uncertain how far it might carry us and how far we had to go,
and so I was plying my trade with the rest, inquiring at each
little town if there were not some malefactor to be mutilated or
beheaded. The vagrants considered us two of themselves, and though
some accorded us more or less exalted rank because I labored only
for the authorities, others affected to despise us as the
instruments of tyranny.
One evening, a grinder who had been
friendlier than most and had done us several trifling favors
offered to sharpen Terminus Est for me. I told him I kept her quite sharp enough for
the work and invited him to test her edge with a finger. After he
had cut himself slightly (as I had known he would) he grew quite
taken with her, admiring not only her blade but her soft sheath,
her carven guard, and so on. When I had answered innumerable
questions regarding her making, history, and mode of use, he asked
if I would permit him to hold her. I cautioned him about the weight
of the blade and the danger of striking its fine edge against
something that might injure it, then handed her over. He smiled and
gripped the hilt as I had instructed him; but as he began to lift
that long and shining instrument of death, his face went
pale and his arms began to tremble so that I snatched her away from
him before he dropped her. Afterward all he would say was
I’ve sharpened soldiers’ swords often, over
and over.
Now I learned how he had felt. I laid
the pistol on the table so quickly I nearly lost hold of it, then
walked around and around it as though it had been a snake coiled to
strike.
It was shorter than my hand, and so
prettily made that it might have been a piece of jewelry; yet every
line of it told of an origin beyond the nearer stars. Its silver
had not yellowed with time, but might have come fresh from the
buffing wheel. It was covered with decorations that were, perhaps,
writing—I could not really tell which, and to eyes like mine,
accustomed to patterns of straight lines and curves, they sometimes
appeared to be no more than complex or shimmering reflections, save
that they were reflections of something not present. The grips were
encrusted with black stones whose name I did not know, gems like
tourmalines but brighter. After a time I noticed that one, the
smallest of all, seemed to vanish unless I looked at it straight
on, when it sparkled with four-rayed brilliancy. Examining it more
closely, I found it was not a gem at all, but a minute lens through
which some inner fire shone. The pistol retained its charge then,
after so many centuries.
Illogical though it might be, the
knowledge reassured me. A weapon may be dangerous to its user in
two ways: by wounding him by accident, or by failing him. The first
remained; but when I saw the brightness of that point of light, I
knew the second could be dismissed.
There was a sliding stud under the
barrel that seemed likely to control the intensity of the
discharge. My first thought was that whoever had last handled it
would probably have set it to maximum intensity, and that by
reversing the setting I would be able to experiment with some
safety. But it was not so—the stud was positioned at the center of
its range. At last I decided, by analogy with a bowstring, that the
pistol was likely to be least dangerous when the stud was as far
forward as possible. I put it there, pointed the weapon at the
fireplace, and pulled the trigger.
The sound of a shot is the most
horrible in the world. It is the scream of matter itself. Now the
report was not loud, but threatening, like distant thunder. For an
instant—so brief a time I might almost have believed I dreamed it—a
narrow cone of violet flashed between the muzzle of the pistol and
the heaped wood. Then it was gone, the wood was blazing, and slabs
of burned and twisted metal fell with the noise of cracked bells
from the back of the fireplace. A rivulet of silver ran out onto
the hearth to scorch the mat and send up nauseous
smoke.
I put the pistol into the sabretache of
my new journeyman’s habit.