Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun

The dark woman said, “Which may be this.”

I hesitated. I did not want to feign to be the exultant Odilo plainly took me for; but to announce myself the Autarch Severian would be awkward even if I were believed.

The doll-faced woman rescued me. “I’m Pega, and I was the armagette Pelagia’s soubrette.”

Odilo frowned. “Hardly well mannered for you to introduce yourself in such a way, Pega. You were her ancilla.”

And then to me. “She was a good servant, sieur, I have no question. A trifle giddy, perhaps.”

The doll-faced woman looked chastened, though I suspected the expression was entirely assumed. “I did madame’s hair and took care of her things, but she really kept me to tell her all the latest jokes and gossip, and to train Picopicaro. That was what she said, and she always called me her soubrette.” A fat tear rolled down her cheek, gleaming in the sun; but whether it was for her dead mistress or the dead bird, I could not be sure.

“And this, ah, female will not introduce herself to Pega and me. That is, beyond her name, which is—”

“Thais.”

“I am enriched by this introduction,” I said. By then I had remembered that I held honorary commissions in half a dozen legions and epitagms, all of which I could employ as incognitos without a lie. “Hipparch Severian, of the Black Tarentines.”

Pega’s mouth shaped a tiny circle. “Ooh! I must’ve seen you in the procession!” She turned to the woman who had called herself Thais. “His men wore lacquered cuir-bouilli with white plumes, and you never saw such destriers!”

Odilo murmured, “You went with your mistress, I take it?”

Pega made some response, but I gave it no heed. A corpse bobbing a chain from the raft had caught my eye, and I thought how absurd it was that I should squat on a dead man’s furniture and dissemble to servants with Valeria rotting underwater. How she would have mocked me! At a pause in the talk, I asked Odilo whether his father had not been steward before him in the same place.

He beamed with pleasure. “He was indeed, sieur, and gave the most complete satisfaction all his life. That was in the great days of Father Inire, sieur, when, if I may say so, sieur, our Hypogeum Apotropaic was famous all across the Commonwealth. May I ask why you inquire, sieur?”

“I merely wondered. It’s more or less the usual thing, I believe.”

“It is, sieur. The son’s given an opportunity to show his mettle if he can; and if he does, he retains the office. You may not believe it, sieur, but my father once encountered your namesake before he had become Autarch. Do you know of his life and deeds, sieur?”

“Not as much as I’d like to, Odilo.”

“Graciously spoken, sieur. Most graciously spoken indeed.” The fat steward nodded and beamed at the two women to make sure they appreciated the exquisite courtesy of my reply.

Pega was studying the sky. “It’s going to rain, I believe. Maybe we won’t die of thirst after all.”

Thais said, “Another storm. We’ll drown instead.”

I told them I hoped not, and began to examine my emotional state before I remembered it could no longer be the power of my star that had summoned the clouds gathering in the east.

Odilo was not to be deprived of his anecdote. “It was late one night, sieur, and my father was making his final rounds when he saw someone attired in the fuligin habiliments of a carnifex, though without the customary sword of execution. As was to be expected, his first thought was that the man was arrayed for a masque, of which there are always several in one part or another of the House Absolute on any given night. Yet he knew none was to take place in our Hypogeum Apotropaic, neither Father Inire nor the then Autarch having much fondness for those diversions.”

I smiled, recalling the House Azure. The dark woman shot me a significant glance and ostentatiously covered her lips with her hand, but I had no desire to cut Odilo’s recital short; now that I would no longer wander through the Corridors of Time, all that concerned the past or the future seemed infinitely precious to me.

“His next thought — which had better been his first, sieur, as he often owned to my mother and me as we sat by the fireside — was that this carnifex had set out upon some sinister mission, supposing himself apt to pass unobserved. It was vital, sieur, as my father understood at once, to learn if his errand served Father Inire or some other. My father therefore approached him as boldly as if he’d a cohort of hastarii at his back and asked his business straight out.”

Thais murmured, “If he had been set upon some evil errand, he would have owned it, no doubt.”

Odilo said, “My dear lady, I don’t know whom you may be, as you have refrained from informing us even when our exalted guest obligingly made us privy to his own patrician identity. But you obviously know nothing of artifice, nor of the intrigues carried out daily — and nightly! — among the myriad hallways of our House Absolute. My father was well aware that no agent entrusted with an irrevealable commission would disclose it, however abrupt the demand. He hazarded that some involuntary gesture or fleeting expression might betray treachery, were such intended.”

“Wasn’t that Severian masked?” I asked. “You said he was dressed as a torturer.”

“I’m quite certain he wasn’t, sieur, as my father described him often — a most savage countenance, sieur, severely scarred on one cheek.”

“I know!” Pega broke in. “I’ve seen his portrait and his bust. They’re in the Hypogeum Abscititious, where the Autarch put them when she married again. He looked like he’d cut your throat whistling.”

I felt that someone had cut my own.

“Quite apropos!” Odilo approved. “My father said much the same, though he never put it so succinctly that I can recall.”

Pega was examining me. “He never had children, did he?”

Odilo smiled. “One would have heard of that , I imagine.”

“Legitimate children. But he could have covered any woman in the House Absolute, just by cocking an eyebrow. Exultants, all of them.”

Odilo told her to hold her tongue and said, “I do hope you will forgive Pega, sieur. After all, it’s rather a compliment.”

“To be told I look like a cutthroat? Yes, it’s the kind I’m always getting.” I spoke without reflection and continued in the same way, seeking at once to turn the talk to Valeria’s remarriage and to conceal the grief I felt. “But wouldn’t the cutthroat have to be my grandfather? Severian the Great would be eighty or more if he were alive, surely. Whom should I ask about him, Pega? My mother or my father? And don’t you think there must have been something about him after all, for him to command so many fine chatelaines when he’d been a torturer in his youth, even if the Autarch took a new husband?”

To fill the silence that followed my little speech, Odilo said, “That guild is abolished, sieur, I believe.”

“Of course you do. That’s what people always believe.” The whole of the east was black already, and the motion of our improvised raft had grown perceptibly more lively.

Pega whispered, “I didn’t mean to offend, Hipparch. It’s just that…” Whatever it was, was lost in the breaking of a wave.

“No,” I told her. “You’re right. He was a hard man from all I know of him; and a cruel one too, at least by reputation, though perhaps he wouldn’t have owned to that. Quite possibly Valeria wed him for his throne, though I believe she’s sometimes said otherwise. Her second husband made her happy, at least.”

Odilo chortled. “Well put, sieur. A distinct hit. You must take care, Pega, when you cross swords with a soldier.”