Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun

“Not much to tell. When I was captain of apprentices it was easy enough to slip away and see Maxellindis whenever her uncle’s boat was docked somewhere around the Algedonic Quarter. I had talked to the sailors and learned to sail a bit myself; and so when it came feast time, I couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t put on fuligin.”

I said, “I did it only because I couldn’t imagine living in any place except the Matachin Tower .”

Eata nodded. “But I could, see? I’d thought all that year about living on the boat and helping Maxellindis and her uncle. He was getting stiff, and they needed somebody spry and stronger than her. I didn’t wait for the masters to call me in to choose. I just ran off.”

“And after that?”

“Forgot the torturers as fast as I could and as much as I could. Only lately I’ve started trying to remember what it was like, living in the Matachin Tower when I was young. You won’t believe this, Severian, but for years I couldn’t look at Citadel Hill when we went up or down that reach. I used to keep my eyes turned away.”

“I do believe you,” I told him.

“Maxellindis’s uncle died. There was a tap he used to go to, way down south in the delta in a place called Liti. You’ve probably never heard of it. Maxellindis and me came to get him one night, and he was sitting there with his bottle and glass, with one arm on the table and his head down on his arm; but when I tried to shake his shoulder he fell out of the chair, and he was cold already.”

“’Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.’”

“What’s that?” Eata asked.

“Just an old story,” I said. “Never mind, go on.”

“After that, just her and me worked the boat. The two of us could do it about as well as the three of us had before. We never really got married. When we both wanted to we never had the money, somehow. And when we had the money, there was always some kind of quarrel. After a couple of years everybody thought we were married anyway.” He blew his nose, flinging the mucus over the side.

“Go on,” I said again.

“We did some smuggling, and one night we got stopped by a cutter. Eight or ten leagues south of Citadel Hill, that was. Maxellindis jumped — I heard the splash — and I would have too, but one of the taxmen threw a achico at my feet and tripped me up. You know what they are, I suppose.”

I nodded. “Was I Autarch still? You might have appealed to me.”

“No. I thought about it, but I was sure you’d send me back to the guild.”

“I wouldn’t have,” I told him, “but would that have been worse than what the law did to you?”

“It would have been for the rest of my life. That’s what I kept thinking about. Anyway, they took me upriver with our boat in tow. I was held till the assize, and then the judge ordered me flogged and made me sign on a carrack. They kept me in irons till we were out of sight of the coast, and they worked me like a slave, but I got to see the Xanthic Lands and I went over the side there and stayed for two years. It’s not such a bad place if you’ve got some money.”

I said, “But you came back.”

“There was a riot and this girl that I’d been living with got killed in it. They have them there every couple years over the price of food in the market. The soldiers break heads, and I guess they broke hers. There was a caravel anchored off Blue Flower Island right then, and I went to see the captain and he gave me a berth. A man can be a terrible fool when he’s young, and I thought maybe Maxellindis had got us another boat. But when I came back she wasn’t on the river. I’ve never seen her again. She died, I guess, the night the cutter got its grapple on us.”

He paused chin in hand. “Maxellindis was almost as good a swimmer as I ever was. You remember I could swim almost as well as you and Drotte, but maybe a nixie pulled her down. That used to happen, sometimes, specially on the lower reaches.”

I said, “I know,” remembering Juturna’s huge face as I had glimpsed it as a boy, when I had almost drowned in Gyoll.

“Not much more to tell I’d brought back a bit of money in a silk cestus I’d had a man make for me over there, and I got a little more when the caravel paid off. I bought this boat here on shares and here I am. But I can still speak a little of the Xanthic tongue, and more will come to my mouth when I hear it in another one. Or it would if we had more water and a little more food.”

I told him “There are many isles in that sea. I saw them on a chart in the Hypotherm Classis once.”

He nodded “I guess a couple hundred, and a lot more that don’t show on any chart I’ve seen. You’d think a ship couldn’t miss them all but it can. Unless you’re pretty lucky, you can pass right between them without ever knowing they’re there. A lot depends on when it’s night and when it’s day, and a lot more on how high up your lookout stands — if he’s in the maintop of a carrack or the bow of my little boat.”

I shrugged. “We can only hope.”

“That’s like the frog said when he seen the stork. But his mouth was dry, and he couldn’t quite get the word out.”

Eata paused for a moment, studying me instead of the waves. “Severian, do you know what’s happened to you? Even if you’re just a dream from the cacogens?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not a phantom. Or if I am, it’s Tzadkiel the Hierogrammate you should blame for me.”

“Then tell me what happened to you, just like I told you everything that’s happened to me.”

“All right, but I want to ask you something first. What took place here on Urth after I left?”

Eata sat down on a locker from which he could look up at me without turning his head. “That’s right,” he said. “You sailed off to bring the New Sun, didn’t you? Did you ever find him?”

“Yes and no. I’ll tell you all about that as soon as you tell me what happened on Urth.”

“I don’t know much about what you’d probably like to hear.” He rubbed his jaw. “Anyway, I’m not so sure I can remember just what went on or just when it was. All the while Maxellindis and me were together you were Autarch, but mostly they said you were off fighting the Ascians. Then, when I got back from the Xanthic Lands, you were gone.”

I said, “If you stayed two years, you must have been eight with Maxellindis.”

“That would be about right. Four or five with her and her uncle, and two or three after, just us two on the boat. Anyway, your autarchia, she was Autarch. People talked about it because of her being a woman, and they said she didn’t have the words.

“So when I traded my extern gold for chrisos, some had your face on them and some hers, or anyway some woman’s. She married Dux Caesidius. They had a big celebration all up and down Iubar Street , meat and wine for everybody. I got drunk, and I didn’t get back to my boat for three days. People said their marrying was good — she could stay in the House Absolute and take care of the Commonwealth while he took care of the Ascians.”

“I remember him,” I said. “He was a fine commander.” It was strange to summon up that hawk face and imagine its fierce, surly owner lying with Valeria.

“Some said she did it because he looked like you,” Eata told me. “But he was handsomer, I think, and maybe a little taller.”

I tried to remember. Handsomer, certainly, than I had been with my scarred face. It seemed to me that Caesidius had been a bit below me in height, though every man is taller when everyone kneels to him, to be sure.

“And then he died,” Eata continued. “That was last year.”

“I see,” I said.