Ascians

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In THE CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH, the concluding volume of Gene Wolfe's magnificent New Sun quartet, a very strange scene takes place. A battle between the Ascians and the Commonwealth has been raging; during a temporary lull, however, Severian, our narrator and the novel's protagonist, notes the following :

"The savages seemed to have vanished. A new force appeared in their place, on the flank that had now become our front. At first I thought they were cavalry on centaurs, creatures whose pictures I had encountered in the brown book. I could see the heads and shoulders of the riders above the human heads of their mounts, and both appeared to bear arms. When they drew nearer, I saw they were nothing so romantic: merely small men--dwarfs, in fact--upon the shoulders of very tall ones." (CITADEL, 180)

Only later, as Severian immerses himself in the fray, does he realize the even more bizarre aspect of these ridden tallmen:

"One of the tallmen dashed forward...As he drew nearer he slowed, and I saw that his eyes were unfocused, and that he was in fact blind." (181)

Sound slightly familiar in a déjà lu kind of way? If so, it's because we've already encountered these blind tallmen with their dwarf riders in the larger Wolfe universe. They, in fact, first appear in "'A Story,' by John Marsch,'" the middle novella of TFHofC. John Sandwalker, along with his newly-made friends, the Shadow children, is being stalked by four marshmen at this juncture. Fortunately, Sandwalker and company are anything but defenseless:

"A man loomed in front of him and Sandwalker kicked him expertly, then drove the head down with his hands to meet his knees; he took a step backwards and a Shadow child was on the man's shoulders, his fleshless legs locked around the throat and his fingers plunged into the hair. 'Come,' Sandwalker said urgently, 'we have to get away.'

" 'Why?' The Shadow child sounded calm and happy. 'We're winning.' The man he rode, who had been doubled over in agony, straightened up and tried to free himself; the Shadow child's legs tightened, and as Sandwalker watched, the marshman fell to his knees."

Somewhat later, then:

"The marshman who had dropped to his knees a moment before rose shakily, and guided by the Shadow child on his shoulder's staggered away [back toward the pit]... The four men were there, three of them with riders on their shoulders, the fourth moaning and swaying, scrubbing with bloodied hands at the bleeding sockets of his eyes." (p.104-105, Scribners).

Given that the Shadow children of FIFTH HEAD are pygmy-sized, and the taller, ridden marshmen have been blinded--the same particulars being recapitulated with the tallmen cavalry in CITADEL--is Wolfe trying to tell us something about the Ascians--\\that, in fact, they're Annese in origin? Surely, this is not that subversive an idea; remember, according to Wolfe, the abos of Ste. Anne are actually deracinated Adamic stock, having come to the green world in several earlier migratory waves (hence my frequent use of the term Homo sapiens pangalacticus throughout CAVE CANEM). Could not, at some future's remove, the Annese, aided and abetted by the reintroduction of spacefaring, make their way back to the mother planet? Indeed, Severian himself claims such returns are quite normal in THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, as he's travelling from Briah to Yesod. "In ancient times," says he, "the peoples of Urth journeyed among the suns. [And while] many others stayed on that world or this, many came home at last." [Italics and inversion mine--I reversed clauses for effect in the 2nd sentence.] So it's certainly well within the Wolfean range of ideaspace that such a repatriation may have taken place. But other than the tallmen riders, is there any other evidence for this?

Well, consider the alzabo. Somehow, it manages to makes its way from Sainte Anne to Urth (this, of course, presupposes you accept the ghoul bear = alzabo notion). It's possible the Annese may have brought it back with them as zoetic transport--\\imported fauna from home to populate a vivarium and perhaps provide a study or nostalgia base for future generations.

Then there's green Lune. Might not the original impulse behind its forestation be to remind the displaced Annese of their home world? It's also been orbitally shifted, if we're to believe old Rudesind, who describes a painting of a smaller, grayer moon thusly: "Doesn't seem so big either, because it wasn't so close in." Again, by moving the moon in to make it appear larger--a faux sister world--could this have been done by the heartsick Annese, pining for Sainte Anne?

Then there are several passages in CITADEL that echo either implicitly or explicitly similar passages in FIFTH HEAD. Witness, for example, Ava's remark to Severian in the lazaret where she is a Pelerine postulant and he a recovering patient: "Ascians are not human." Compare this with the account of Mrs. Blount in 5H, who describes the native Annese with similar dispassion: "We called them the abos or the wild people. They weren't really people, you know, just animals shaped like people." And for something almost directly echoic, consider Dr. Hagsmith's remark about how the abos are "not...really human."

Meanwhile, back on Urth and still in the thick of battle, Severian apprises us of yet another salient detail: "I think I must have cut down half a dozen Ascians before I saw that they all looked the same--not that they all had the same face, but that the differences between them seemed accidental and trivial...All had large, brilliant, wild eyes, hair clipped nearly to the skull, starved faces, screaming mouths, and prominent teeth." This too has a parallel in FIFTH HEAD, where, as we're told by Number Five, because of the small population base, "most of us have a kind of planetary face." And how very much like some mad machination of Maitre, whose outsourced Wolfe clones, especially if they're allowed to reproduce, might well come to dominate the Sainte Croix gene pool. Indeed, though the words are Appian's, the following might well summarize the end, if subconscious, result of Maitre's cloning experiments--\\even more so if they're continued by Number Five and his successors: "They [the Ascians] wish the race to become a single individual...the same, duplicated to the end of number." Granted, the Wolfes of Saint Croix are hardly Annese autochthons (except for possibly Aunt Jeannine); but even if refractive, I still maintain the parallels are germane.

But what about the abos' characteristic lack of manual dexterity? Is there anything in the New Sun books that seems to indicate the Ascians are any less impaired? In my opinion, no. From what Severian tells us the Ascian regulars are equipped with energy spears--not exactly weapons that appear to require a great deal of cheiral finesse. And while the dwarf tallriders also utilize bows-and-arrows, if the marshmen of Sainte Anne can weave and deploy fishing nets, it does not seem that big of a stretch to imagine them notching an arrow and pulling back a bowstring (recall as well Victor's expertise with ropes and knots--Dr. Marsch is most impressed with this if we're to believe his diary entries).

Even Severian the Great eventually seems to realize the Ascians are something other than simple battle foes. At least that's how I interpret his asking Appian, "Who are they?" Or as he elaborates in asking for yet further clarification from the old autarch, "I asked who they are, Sieur. I know they're our enemies, that they live to the north in the hot countries, and that they're said to be enslaved by Erebus. But who are they?" What exactly, however, isn't covered by Severian's précis? Could it be planet of origin? A not-so-much who are they, but <u>what</u> are they? At any rate he's told by Appian, "Who they are you will discover in due time," although we never hear Severian disclose any such result within the New Sun narrative frame. (And yet he does spend a year with them later. Is this a clue?)

But if indeed the answer to Sev's triply-asked question is the Ascians are our old friends and lost cousins, the abos of Sainte Anne, let's consider the delicious irony of this. In classical mythology, because they live in the torrid zone, the Ascians have no meridian shadow twice yearly (Ascian actually means without shadow). If we accept the notion that shadow represents soul--a popular motif in fairy tales--and that having souls makes us uniquely human (Wolfe as Master Ash seems to endorse this view when he has Ash relate the tale about how "a man sold his shadow and found himself driven out wherever he went. No one would believe that he was human")--it seems possible to connect the shadowlessness of the Ascians with their enslavement to Erebus, one of Urth's alien great monsters. Having apparently returned to their mother world in some glory (imagine the resources needed to terraform and shift the moon), rather than be content with this, the Annese/Ascians have chosen to cast their lots with megatherian Erebus, a being named after the underworld darkness beneath Hades, and through which all dead must pass. In other words, now soulless, the former Shadow children have gone apenumbral, becoming in a completely different sense, well, yes, shades--and by so doing forfeit both humanity and future.

But then in many respects this is what FIFTH HEAD is about, even if it does unofficially conclude in a series about transcendence and resurrection: a descent through various levels of darkness, and ending in hell.

For surely, repatriated to Urth, but mocked by forested green Lune in the skies above them, this is where the Shadow children and their brethren have wound up--enslaved by an alien overseer, condemned to speak in stock phrases, shadowless in the dying, sun-impoverished inferno of home. In which case Sev's year-long sojourn among them might well represent not so much diplomatic niceties, but the harrowing of hell itself.

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