For the last time we went out through the rent in the wall and threaded the paths of bone that wound among the cypresses and tombs. The death roses I had hesitated to pick for Thecla still showed a few autumnal blooms, and I found myself thinking of Morwenna, the only woman whose life I have ever taken, and of her enemy, Eusebia.

When we had passed the gate of the necropolis and entered the squalid city streets, my companions seemed to become almost lighthearted. I think they must have been subconsciously afraid they would be seen by Master Gurloes and punished in some way for having obeyed the Autarch.

“I hope you’re not planning on going for a swim,” Drotte said. “These choppers would sink us.”

Roche chuckled. “Eata can float with his.”

“We’re going far to the north. Well need a boat, but I think well be able to hire one if we walk along the embankment.”

“If anybody will rent to us. And if we’re not arrested. You know. Autarch—”

“Severian,” I reminded him. “For as long as I wear these clothes.”

“—Severian, we’re only supposed to carry these things to the block, and it will take a lot of talking to make the peltasts think three of us are necessary. Will they know who you are? I don’t—”

This time it was Eata who interrupted him, pointing toward the river. “Look, there’s a boat!”

Roche bellowed, all three waved, and I held up one of the chrisos I had borrowed from the castellan, turning it so it would flash in the sunlight that was then just beginning to show over the towers behind us.

The man at the tiller waved his cap, and what appeared to be a slender lad sprang forward to put the dipping lugsails on the other tack.

She was two-masted, rather narrow of beam and low of freeboard—an ideal craft, no doubt, for running untaxed merchandise past the patrol cutters that had suddenly become mine. The grizzled old moonraker of a steersman looked capable of much worse, and the slender “lad” was a girl with laughing eyes and a facility for looking from them sidelong.

“Well, this ‘pears to be a day,” the steersman said when he saw our habits. “I thought you was in mournin’, I did, till I got up close. Eyes? I never heard of ‘um, no more than a crow in court.”

“We are,” I told him as I got on board. It gave me a ridiculous pleasure to find I had not lost the sea legs I had acquired on the Samru, and to watch Drotte and Roche grab to the sheets when the lugger rocked beneath their weight.

“Mind if I’ve a look at that yellow boy? Just to see if he’s good. I’ll send him right home.”

I tossed him the coin, which he rubbed and bit and at last surrendered with a respectful look.

“We may need your boat all day.”

“For the yellow boy, you can have her all night too. We’ll both be glad of the company, like the undertaker remarked to the ghost. There was things in the river up till first light, which I suppose might have something to do with you optimates being out on the water this mornin?’

“Cast off,” I said. “You can tell me, if you will, what these strange things were while we are under way.”

Although he had broached the subject himself, the steersman seemed reluctant to go into much detail—perhaps only because he had difficulty in finding words to express what he had felt and to describe what he had seen and heard. There was a light west wind, so that with the lugger’s battenstiffened sails drawn taut we were able to, run upstream handily. The brown girl had little to do but sit in the bow and trade glances with Eata. (It is possible she thought him, in his dirty grey shirt and trousers, only a paid attendant of ours.) The steersman, who called himself her uncle, kept a steady pressure on the tiller as he talked, to keep the lugger from flying off the wind.

“I’ll tell you what I saw myself, like the carpenter did when he had the shutter up. We was eight or nine leagues north of where you hailed us. Clams was our cargo, you see, and there’s no stoppin’ with them, not when there’s a chance of a warm afternoon. We goes down to the lower river and buys them off the diggers, do you see, then runs them up the channel quick so’s they can be et before they goes bad. If they goes off you lose all, but you make double or better it you can sell them good.

“I’ve spent more nights on the river in my life than anywhere else—it’s my bedroom, you might say, and this boat’s my cradle, though I don’t usually get to sleep until mornin’. But last night-sometimes I felt like I wasn’t on old Gyoll at all, but on some other river, one that run up into the sky, of under the ground.

“I doubt you noticed unless you was out late, but it was a still night with just little breaths of wind that would blow for about as long as it takes a man to swear, then die down, then blow again. There was mist too, thick as cotton. It hung over the water the way mists always does, with about so much dear space as you could roll a keg through between it and the river. Most of the time we couldn’t see the lights on either shore, just the mist. I used to have a horn I blowed for those that couldn’t see our lights, but it went over the side last year, and being copper it sunk. So I shouted last night, whenever I felt like there was another boat or anything close by us.

“About a watch after the mist came I let Maxellindis go to sleep. Both sails was set, and when each puff of air come we would go up river a bit, and then I’d set out the anchor again. You maybe don’t know it, optimates, but the rule of the river is that them that’s goin’ up keeps to the sides and them that’s goin’ down takes the middle. We was goin’ up and ought to have been over to the east bank, but with the mist I couldn’t tell.

“Then I heard sweeps. I looked in the mist, but I couldn’t see lights, and I hollered so they’d sheer off. I leaned over the gunnel and put my ear close to the water so’s to hear better. A mist soaks up noises, but the best hearin’ you can ever have Is when you gets your head under one, because the noise run; right along the water. Anyway, I did that, and she was a big one. You can’t count how many sweeps there is with a good crew pullin’, because they all go in and come up together but when a big vessel goes fast you can hear water breakin under her bow, and this was a big one. I got up on top of the deckhouse tryin’ to see her, but there still wasn’t any lights though I knew she had to be close.

“Just when I was climbin’ down I caught the sight of hera galleass, four-masted and four-banked, no lights, comin right up the channel, as near as I could fudge. Pray for them that’s comin’ down, thinks I to myself, like the ox said when he fell out of the riggin”.

“Of course I only saw her for a minute before she was gone in the mist again, but I heard her a long while after. Seein her like that made me feel so queer I yelled every once in a while even if no other craft was by. We had made another half league, I suppose, or maybe a little less, when I heard somebody yell back. Only it wasn’t like answerin’ my hail, but like somebody’d laid a rope end to him. I called again, and he called back regular, and it was a man I know named Trason what has his own boat just like I do.

‘Is it you?’ he called, and I said it was and asked if he was all right. ‘Tie up!’ he says.

“I told him I couldn’t. I had clams, and even if the night was cool, I wanted to sell soon as I could.

Tie up,’ Trason calls again. Tie up and go ashore.’ So I call back, ‘Why don’t you?’ Just then he come in sight, and there was more on his boat than I would’ve thought it would hold—pandours, I’d have said, but every pandour ever I saw had a face brown as mine or nearly, and these was white as the mist. They had scorpions and voulges—I could see the heads of them stickin’ up over the crests of their helmets.”

I interrupted him to ask if the soldiers he had seen were starved looking and if they had large eyes.