The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXXII — To the Alcyone

THEY HAD expected neither of us — there were no extra places set at the table. I pulled up a chair for myself, and then (when he only stood and stared) another for Zama .

“We thought you were gone, sieur,” Hadelin said. His face, and hers, told plainly enough where Burgundofara had spent the night.

“I was,” I said, speaking to her and not to him. “But I see you got into our room all right to get your clothes.”

“I thought you were dead,” Burgundofara said. When I did not reply, she added, “I thought this man had killed you. The doorway was blocked up with stuff I had to push over, but the shutters had been broken open.”

“Anyway, sieur, you’re back.” Hadelin tried to sound cheerful and failed. “Still going downriver with us?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “When I’ve seen your craft.”

“Then you will be, sieur, I think.”

The innkeeper appeared, bowing and forcing himself to smile. I noticed he had a butcher knife thrust through his belt behind his leather apron.

“Fruit for me,” I told him. “Last night you said you had some. Bring some for this man too; we’ll see whether he eats it. Mate for both of us.”

“Immediately, sieur.”

“After I’ve eaten, you and I can go up to my room. It’s been damaged, and we’ll have to decide by how much.”

“That won’t be necessary, sieur. A trifle! Perhaps we can agree upon an orichalk as a token payment?” He tried to rub his hands in the way such people often do, but their tremors made the gesture ridiculous.

“Five, I should think, or ten. A broken door, a damaged wall, and a broken bed — you and I shall go up and make a reckoning.”

His lips were trembling too, and suddenly it was no longer pleasant to terrify this little man who had come with his lantern and his stick when he heard one of his guests attacked. I said, “You shouldn’t drink so much,” and touched his hands.

He smiled, chirped, “Thank you, sieur! Fruit, yes, sieur!” and trotted away.

It was all tropical, as I had half expected: plantains, oranges, mangoes, and bananas brought overland to the upper river by trains of sumpters and shipped south. There were no apples and no grapes. I borrowed the knife that had stabbed Zama to peel a mango, and we ate in silence. After a time Zama ate too, which I thought a good sign.

“Something more, sieur?” the innkeeper asked at my elbow. “We’ve plenty.”

I shook my head.

“Then perhaps…?” He nodded toward the stair, and I rose, motioning for the others to remain where they were.

Burgundofara said, “You should have kept him frightened. It would have been cheaper.” The innkeeper shot her a glance of raw hatred.

His inn, which had looked small enough the night before when I had been tired and it was wrapped in darkness, I saw to be tiny now, four rooms on our floor, and four more, I suppose, on the floor above. The room itself, which had seemed capacious enough when I lay upon the torn mattress listening to Zama move about, was hardly larger than the cabin Burgundofara and I had shared on the tender. Zama’s ax, old and worn and intended for wood, stood in one corner.

“I didn’t want you to come so I could get money from you, sieur,” the innkeeper told me. “Not for this or anything. Not any time.”

I looked about at the destruction. “But you’ll have it.”

“Then I’ll give it away. There’s many a poor man in Os these days.”

“I imagine so.” I was not really listening to what he said or to what I said myself, but examining the shutters; it was to see them that I had insisted on coming upstairs. Burgundofara had mentioned that they had been broken, and she was right. The wood had split away from the screws that had held the bolt. I recalled bolting them and later opening them. When I retraced my actions in memory, I found that I had merely touched them and they had flown open.

“It would be wrong, sieur, for me to take anything after what you’ve brought me. Why, the Chowder Pot will be famous forever all up and down the river.” His eyes stared off into some heaven of notoriety invisible to me. “Not that we’re not known already — the best inn in Os. But some’ll come and stay here just to see this.” Inspiration seized him. “I won’t have it fixed, not nothing! I’ll leave it just like it is!”

I said, “Charge them to come in.”

“Yes, sieur, you have it. Not patrons, to be sure. But I’ll charge the others, yes indeed!”

I was about to order him to do no such thing, to have the damage repaired instead; but when I had opened my mouth to speak, I shut it again. Was it to snatch away this man’s good fortune — if good fortune it was — that I had returned to Urth? He loved me now as a father loves a son he admires without understanding. What right had I to harm him?

“My patrons were talking last night. I don’t suppose, sieur, you know what happened after you brought poor Zama back?”

“Tell me,” I said.

When we were downstairs again, I insisted on paying him, though he did not want to accept the money. “Dinner last night for the woman and me. Lodging for Zama and me. Two orichalks for the door, two for the wall, two for the bed, two for the shutters. Breakfast for Zama and me this morning. Put the woman’s lodging and breakfast to Captain Hadelin’s score and see what mine comes to.”

He did, writing out a full list on a scrap of brown paper with a sputtering and much chewed quill, then counting out neat stacks of silver, copper, and brass for me. I asked whether he was sure I had so much due.

“It’s the same prices for everybody here, sieur. We don’t charge by what a man has, but by what he’s had — though I don’t like charging you at all.”

Hadelin’s bill was settled with much less calculation, and the four of us left. Of all the inns at which I have stayed, I think I most regret leaving the Chowder Pot, with its good food and drink, and its company of honest rivermen. Often I have dreamed of going back, and perhaps sometime I shall. Certainly more guests came to our aid when Zama broke our door than there was any reason to expect, and I would like to think that one or even several of them were myself. Indeed it sometimes seems to me that I caught a glimpse of my own face in the candlelight that night.

However that may be, I had no thought of it as we stepped out into the morning-fresh street. The first hush of dawn was past, and carts rumbled along its ruts; women with their heads wrapped in kerchiefs paused on their way to market to stare at us. A flier like a great locust thrummed overhead; I watched it until it was out of sight, feeling the ghost of the strange wind blown from the pentadactyls that had attacked our cavalry at Orithyia.

“You don’t see many anymore, sieur,” Hadelin remarked with a gruffness I had not yet learned to recognize as deference. “Most won’t fly now.”

I confessed I had never seen any like that at all.

We turned a corner and had a fine view down the hill: the dark stone quay and the ships and boats moored there, and broad Gyoll beyond, its water glittering in the sun and its farther bank lost behind shining mist. “We must be well below Thrax,” I said to Burgundofara, confusing her for a moment with Gunnie, to whom I had told something of Thrax.

She turned, smiling, and attempted to take my arm. Hadelin said, “A good week, unless the wind’s with you all the way. Safe here. Surprised you know of a country place like that.”

By the time we reached the quay, a crowd trailed after us, keeping well back for the most part but whispering and pointing at Zama and me. Burgundofara tried to drive them off, and when she failed appealed to me to do it.

“Why?” I said. “We’ll sail soon enough.”

An old woman cried out to Zama and rushed up to embrace him. He smiled, and it was clear she meant no harm. A moment later I saw him nod when she begged to know if he was all right, and I asked whether she was his grandmother.

She made a countrified curtsy. “Oh, no, sieur. But I knew her and all the children in the old days. When I heard Zama was dead, I felt like a piece of me’d died with him.”

“So it had,” I told her.

Sailors came to take our sarcins, and I realized I had been watching Zama and the old woman so intently I had never spared a glance for Hadelin’s vessel. She was a xebec and looked handy enough — I have always been lucky in my ships. Already aboard, Hadelin motioned to us.

The old woman clung to Zama , tears rolling down her cheeks. As I watched, he wiped one away and said, “Don’t cry, Mafalda.” It was the only time he spoke.

The autochthons say that their cattle can speak but do not, knowing that to speak is to call up demons, all our words being only curses in the tongue of the empyrean. Zama’s seemed so in fact. The crowd parted as waves separate for the terrible jaws of a kronosaur, and Ceryx advanced through it.

His iron-shod staff was topped with a rotting human head, his lean frame draped in raw manskin; but when I saw his eyes I wondered that he bothered with such trumpery, as one wonders to see a lovely woman decked with glass beads and gowned in false silk. I had not known him so great a mage.

Impelled by the training of my boyhood, I took the knife Burgundofara put into my hand and saluted him before the Increate should judge between us, the flat of the blade before my face.

No doubt he thought I meant to kill him, as Burgundofara was demanding. He spoke into his left hand and made ready to cast the poisoned spell.

Zama changed. Not slowly, as such things occur in tales, but with a suddenness more frightful he was again the dead man who had burst into our room. There was a cry from the crowd, like the shriek of a troop of apes.

Ceryx would have fled, but they closed before him like a wall. Perhaps someone held him, or obstructed him intentionally; I do not know. In an instant Zama was upon him, and I heard his neck break as a bone snaps in the jaws of a dog.

For a breath the two lay together, the dead man on the dead man; then Zama rose, living once more and now alive fully, or so it appeared. I watched him recognize the old woman and me, and his lips parted. Half a dozen blades pierced him before he could speak.

By the time I reached him, he was less a man than a gobbet of bleeding flesh. Blood spurted in weakening streams from his throat; no doubt his heart still beat under its welter of blood, though his chest had been opened with a billhook. I stood over him and tried to call him to life yet again. The eyes of the head on Ceryx’s fallen staff rolled in their putrid sockets to stare at me; sickened, I turned away, wondering to find myself, a torturer, grown so cruel. Someone took my hand and led me toward the ship. As we went up the shaky gangplank, I discovered it was Burgundofara.

Hadelin received us among hurrying sailors. “They got him that time, sieur. Last night we were all afraid to strike first. Daylight makes a difference.”

I shook my head. “They killed him because he was no longer dangerous to them, Captain.”

Burgundofara whispered, “He ought to lie down. It takes a great deal out of him.”

Hadelin pointed to a door under the sun deck. “If you’ll go below, sieur. I’ll show you the cabin. It’s not big, but—”

I shook my head again. There were benches on either side of the door, and I asked to rest there. Burgundofara went to look at the cabin while I sat trying to wipe the image of Zama’s face from my eyes and watching the crew make ready to cast off. One of the sun-browned rivermen seemed familiar; but I, who can forget nothing, sometimes have difficulty in bringing the quarry to bay in a memory that grows ever more vast.