Resurrection
Almost nothing remains to be told. Dawn has
come, the red sun like a bloody eye. The wind blows cold through
the window. In a few moments, a footman will carry in a steaming
tray; with him, no doubt, will be old, twisted Father Inire, eager
to confer during the last few moments that remain ; old Father
Inire, alive so long beyond the span of his short-lived kind; old
Father Inire, who will not, I fear, long survive the red sun. How
upset he will be to find I have been sitting up writing all night
here in the clerestory.
Soon I must don robes of argent, the
color that is more pure than white. Never mind.
There will be long, slow days on the
ship. I will read. I still have so much to learn. I will sleep,
dozing in my berth, listening to the centuries wash against the
hull. This manuscript I shall send to Master Ultan; but while I am
on the ship, when I cannot sleep and have tired of reading, I shall
write it out again—I who forget nothing—every word, just as I have
written it here. I shall call it The Book of the
New Sun, for that book, lost now for so many ages, is said
to have predicted his coming. And when it is finished again, I
shall seal that second copy in a coffer of lead and set it adrift
on the seas of space and time.
Have I told you all I promised? I am
aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that
this or that should be made clear in the knitting up of the story.
I remember them all, I am sure, but then I remember so much else.
Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will
write again.
Two things are clear to me. The first
is that I am not the first Severian. Those who walk the corridors
of Time saw him gain the Phoenix Throne, and thus it was that the
Autarch, having been told of me, smiled in the House Azure, and the
undine thrust me up when it seemed I must drown. (Yet surely the
first Severian did not; something had already begun to reshape my
life.) Let me guess now, though it is only a guess, at the story of
that first Severian.
He too was reared by the torturers, I
think. He too was sent forth to Thrax. He too fled Thrax, and
though he did not carry the Claw of the Conciliator, he must have
been drawn to the fighting in the north—no
doubt he hoped to escape the archon by hiding himself among the
army. How he encountered the Autarch there I cannot say; but
encounter him he did, and so, even as I, he (who in the final sense
was and is myself) became Autarch in turn and sailed beyond the
candles of night. Then those who walk the corridors walked back to
the time when he was young, and my own story—as I have given it
here in so many pages—began.
The second thing is this. He was not
returned to his own time but became himself a walker of the
corridors. I know now the identity of the man called the Head of
Day, and why Hildegrin, who was too near, perished when we met, and
why the witches fled. I know too in whose mausoleum I tarried as a
child, that little building of stone with its rose, its fountain,
and its flying ship all graven. I have disturbed my own tomb, and
now I go to lie in it.
When Drotte, Roche, Eata, and I returned to
the Citadel, I received urgent messages from Father Inire and from
the House Absolute, and yet I lingered. I asked the castellan for a
map. After much searching he produced one, large and old, cracked
in many places. It showed the curtain wall whole, but the names of
the towers were not the names I knew—or that the castellan knew,
for that matter—and there were towers on that map that are not in
the Citadel, and towers in the Citadel that were not on that
map.
I ordered a flier then, and for half a
day soared among the towers. No doubt I saw the place I sought many
times, but if so I did not recognize it.
At last, with a bright and unfailing
lamp, I went down into our oubliette once more, down flight after
flight of steps until I had reached the lowest level. What is it, I
wonder, that has given so great a power to preserve the past to
underground places? One of the bowls in which I had carried soup to
Triskele was there still. (Triskele, who had stirred back to life
beneath my hand two years before I bore the Claw.) I followed
Triskele’s footprints once more, as I had when still an apprentice,
to the forgotten opening, and from there my own into the dark maze
of tunnels.
Now in the steady light of my lamp I
saw where I had lost the track, running straight on when Triskele
had turned aside. I was tempted then to follow him instead of
myself, so that I might see where he had emerged, and in that way
perhaps discover who it was who had befriended him and to whom he
used to return after greeting me, sometimes, in the byways of the
Citadel. Possibly when I come back to Urth I shall do so, if indeed
I do come back.
But once again, I did not turn aside. I
followed the boy-man I had been, down a straight corridor floored
with mud and pierced at rare intervals with forbidding vents and
doors. The Severian I pursued wore ill-fitting shoes with run-down
heels and worn soles; when I turned and flashed my light behind me,
I observed that though the Severian who pursued him had excellent
boots, his steps were of unequal length and the toe of one foot
dragged at each. I thought, One Severian had good boots, the other
good legs. And I laughed to myself, wondering who should come here
in after-years, and whether he would guess that the same feet left
both tracks.
To what use these tunnels were once
put, I cannot say. Several times I saw stairs that had once
descended farther still, but always they led to dark, calm water. I
found a skeleton, its bones scattered by the running feet of
Severian, but it was only a skeleton, and told me nothing. In
places there was writing on the walls, writing in faded orange or
sturdy black; but it was in a character I could not read, as
unintelligible as the scrawlings of the rats in Master Ultan’s
library. A few of the rooms into which I looked held walls in which
there had once ticked a thousand or more clocks of various kinds,
and though all were dead now, their chimes silenced and their hands
corroded at hours that would never come again, I thought them good
omens for one who sought the Atrium of Time.
And at last I found it. The little spot
of sunshine was just as I had remembered it. No doubt I acted
foolishly, but I extinguished my lamp and stood for a moment in the
dark, looking at it. All was silence, and its bright, uneven square
seemed at least as mysterious as it had before.
I had feared I would have difficulty in
squeezing through its narrow crevice, but if the present Severian
was somewhat larger of bone, he was also leaner, so that when I had
worked my shoulders through the rest followed easily
enough.
The snow I recalled was gone, but a
chill had come into the air to say that it would soon return. A few
dead leaves, which must have been carried in some updraft very high
indeed, had come to rest here among the dying roses. The tilted
dials still cast their crazy shadows, useless as the dead clocks
beneath them, though not so unmoving. The carven animals stared at
them, unwinking still.
I crossed to the door and tapped on it.
The timorous old woman who had served us appeared, and I, stepping
into that musty room in which I had warmed myself before, told her
to bring Valeria to me. She hurried away, but before she was out of
sight, something had wakened in the time-worn walls, its
disembodied voices, hundred-tongued, demanding that Valeria report
to some antiquely titled personage who I realized with a start must
be myself.
Here my pen shall halt, reader, though I do
not. I have carried you from gate to gate—from the locked and
fog-shrouded gate of the necropolis of Nessus to that cloud-racked
gate we call the sky, the gate that shall lead me, as I hope,
beyond the nearer stars.
My pen halts, though I do not. Reader,
you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our
lives.
To this account, I, Severian the Lame,
Autarch, do set my hand in what shall be called the last year of
the old sun.