The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXVIII — The Village Beside the Stream

I RECALL thinking, as I leaned over the railing and watched dots of red and gold turn to woodlots, and brown smudges to fields of tangled stalks, how strange we should have looked had there been anyone to watch us, a trim pinnace — just such a vessel as might have lain alongside some wharf in Nessus — floating silently down out of the sky. I felt sure there was no one. It was earliest morning, when even small trees cast long shadows and scarlet foxes trot denward through the dew like flecks of fire.

“Where are we?” I asked the captain. “Which way does the city lie?”

“North by northeast,” he said, pointing.

The supplies he was giving us were in long sarcins of about the bigness of a demicannon’s barrel lashed to the base of the bonaventure. He showed us how to carry them, the strap over the left shoulder and fastened at the hip. He shook our hands, and seemed, so far as I could judge to wish us well sincerely.

A silver pont slid from the seam where the deck met the tender’s side. Burgundofara and I went down it and stood once more upon the soil of Urth.

We turned — as I believe no one could have helped turning — and watched the tender rise, righting herself as soon as her keel was free of the soil, bobbing in a gentle swell none but she could feel and lifting like a kite. We had come to Urth through clouds, as I have said; but the tender found an opening in them (I cannot but think it was so we might watch her) and rose through it, higher and higher, until hull and masts were no more than a pinprick of golden light. At length we saw her blossom to a shining speck, like the steel that falls from a file; then we knew that her crew had freed her sails, all of silver metal and each bigger than many an isle, and sheeted them home, and that we would not see her again. I looked away so that Burgundofara would not notice the tears in my eyes. When I looked back to tell her we should be going, I found that she had been weeping too.

Nessus lay north by northeast, so the captain had said; with the horizon still so near the sun, it was not hard to keep our course. We crossed frost-killed fields for half a league or more, entered a little wood, and soon reached a stream with a path meandering along its bank.

Burgundofara had not spoken until then, and neither had I; but when we saw the water, she went to it and scooped up as much as her hands would hold. When she had drunk it, she said, “Now I know we’ve really come home. I’ve heard that for landsmen it’s eating bread and salt.”

I told her that was so, though I had nearly forgotten it.

“For us it’s drinking the water of a place. There’s usually bread and salt enough on the boats, but water goes bad or leaks away. When we come to a new landing we drink its water, if it’s good water. If it isn’t, we put our curse on it. Do you think this runs to Gyoll?”

“I’m sure it must, or to some larger stream that does. Do you want to return to your village?”

She nodded. “Will you come with me, Severian?”

I remembered Dorcas, and how she had begged me to come with her down Gyoll to find an old man and a house fallen to ruin. “I will if I can,” I told her. “I don’t think I’ll be able to stay.”

“Then maybe I’ll leave when you do, but I’d like to see Liti again first. I’ll kiss my father and all my relations when I get there, and probably stab them when I go. Just the same, I have to see it again.”

“I understand.”

“I hoped you would. Gunnie said you were that kind of man — that you understood a lot of things.”

I had been examining the path as she spoke. Now I motioned her to silence, and we stood listening for perhaps a hundred breaths. A fresh wind stirred the treetops; birds called here and there, though most had already flown north. The stream chuckled to itself.

“What is it?” Burgundofara whispered at last.

“Someone’s run ahead of us. See his tracks? A boy, I think. He may have circled to watch us, or fetched others.”

“A lot of people must use this path.”

I crouched beside the footprint to explain to her. “He was here this morning, when we came. See how dark a mark he made? He’d come across the fields just as we did, and his feet were wet with dew. It will dry soon. His foot’s small for a man’s, but he runs with long strides — a boy that’s nearly a man.”

“You’re deep. Gunnie said you were. I wouldn’t have seen that.”

“You know a thousand times more about ships than I do, though I’ve spent some time on both kinds. I was a mounted scout for a while. This is the sort of thing we did.”

“Maybe we should go the other way.”

I shook my head. “These are the people I’ve come to save. I won’t save them by running from them.”

As we walked on, Burgundofara said, “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You mean anything they know of. Everyone has done something wrong, and I a hundred such things — or rather, ten thousand.”

Because the wood was so hushed and I had not smelled smoke, I had supposed that the place to which the boy had run was a league away at least. The path turned sharply, and a silent village of a dozen huts stood before us.

“Can’t we just walk through?” Burgundofara asked. “They must be asleep.”

“They’re awake,” I told her. “They’re watching us through their doorways, standing to the rear so we won’t see them.”

“You’ve got good eyes.”

“No. But I know something of villagers, and the boy got here before us. If we walk through, we may get pitchforks in our backs.”

I looked from hut to hut and raised my voice: “People of this village! We’re harmless travelers. We have no money. We ask only the use of your path.”

There seemed a slight stirring in the silence. I walked forward and motioned for Burgundofara to follow.

A man of fifty stepped from one of the doorways; his brown beard was streaked with gray, and he carried a flail.

“You’re the hetman of this village,” I said. “We thank you for your hospitality. As I told you, we come in peace.”

He stared at me, reminding me of a certain mason I had once encountered. “Herena says you came from a ship that fell from the sky”

“What does it matter where we came from? We’re peaceful travelers. We ask nothing more than that you let us pass.”

“It matters to me. Herena is my daughter. If she lies, I must know of it.”

I told Burgundofara, “You see, I don’t know everything.” She smiled, though I could see she was frightened.

“Hetman, if you would trust a stranger’s word and not your daughter’s, you’re a fool.” By then the girl had edged near enough the door for me to see her eyes. “Come out, Herena,” I said. “We won’t hurt you.”

She stepped forward, a tall girl of fifteen with long brown hair and a withered arm no larger than an infant’s.

“Why were you spying on us, Herena?”

She spoke, but I could not hear her.

“She wasn’t spying,” her father said. “She was gathering nuts. She’s a good girl.”

Sometimes, though only rarely, a man looks at something he has seen a score of times and sees it in a new way. When I, sulky Thecla, used to set up my easel beside some cataract, my teacher always told me to see it new; I never understood what he meant and soon convinced myself he meant nothing. Now I saw Herena’s withered arm not as a permanent deformity (as I had always seen such things before), but as an error to be righted with a few strokes of the brush.

Burgundofara ventured, “It must be hard…” Realizing she might give offense, she concluded, “Going out so early.”

I said, “I’ll correct your daughter’s arm, if you wish it.”

The hetman opened his lips to speak, then shut them again. Nothing in his face seemed to have changed, but there was fear there.

“Do you wish it?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, of course.”

His eyes, and the unseen stares of all the other villagers, oppressed me. I said, “She must come with me. We won’t go far, and it won’t take long.”

He nodded slowly. “Herena, you must go with the sieur.” (I suddenly realized how rich the clothes I had taken from the stateroom must have looked to these people.) “Be a good girl, and remember that your mother and I will always…” He turned away.

She walked before me, back along the path until the village was out of sight. The place where her withered arm joined her shoulder was concealed under her tattered smock. I told her to take it off; she did so, drawlng it over her head.

I was conscious of the crimson-and-gold leaves, the pink-tinged brown of her skin, as I might have been of the jeweled colors of some microcosm at which I peered through an aperture. Birdsong and water-music were as remote and as sweet as the tinkling of an orchestrion in a courtyard far below.

I touched Herena’s shoulder, and reality itself was clay to be smoothed and stretched. With a pass or two I molded her a new arm, the mirror image of the other. A tear that struck my fingers as I worked felt hot enough to scald them; the girl trembled.

“I’m finished,” I said. “Put on your smock.” I was in the microcosm again, and again it seemed the world to me.

She turned to face me. She was smiling, though her cheeks were streaked with tears. “I love you, my lord,” she said, and at once knelt and kissed the toe of my boot.

I asked, “May I see your hands?” I myself could no longer believe what I had done.

She held them out. “They’ll take me now to be a slave far away. I don’t care. No, they won’t — I’ll go to the mountains and hide.”

I was looking at her hands, which seemed perfect to me in every detail, even when I pressed them together. It is rare for a person to have hands as precisely the same size, the hand used most being always the largest; yet hers were. I muttered, “Who’ll take you, Herena? Is your village raided by cultellarii?”

“The assessors, of course.”

“Just because you have two good arms now?”

“Because I haven’t anything wrong now.” She stopped, stricken by a new possibility, eyes wide. “I don’t, do I?”

It was no time for philosophy. “No, you’re perfect — a very attractive young woman.”

“Then they’ll take me. Are you all right?”

“A little weak, that’s all. I’ll be better in a moment.” I used the hem of my cloak to wipe my forehead, just as I had when I was a torturer.

“You don’t look all nght.”

“It was mostly Urth’s energies that corrected your arm, I think. But they had to come through me. I suppose they must have carried off some of my own with them.”

“You know my name, my lord. What’s yours?”

“Severian.”

“I’ll get you food at my father’s house, Lord Severian. There’s still some left.”

A wind sprang up that sent the brightly colored leaves swirling about our faces as we walked back.