by Gene Wolfe
“No more do I, Torturer. No more does anyone. Every attempt to count them has failed, as has every attempt to tax them systematically. The city grows and changes every night, like writing chalked on a wall. Houses are built in the streets by clever people who take up the cobbles in the dark and claim the ground—did you know that? The exultant Talarican, whose madness manifested itself as a consuming interest in the lowest aspects of human existence, claimed that the persons who live by devouring the garbage of others number two gross thousands. That there are ten thousand begging acrobats, of whom nearly half are women. That if a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because the city breeds and breaks men faster than we respire. Among such a throng, there is no alternative to peace. Disturbances cannot be tolerated, because disturbances cannot be extinguished.
Do you follow me?”
“There is the alternative of order. But yes, until that is achieved, I understand.”
The lochage sighed and turned to face me. “If you understand that at least, good. It will be necessary, then, for you to obtain more conventional clothing.”
“I cannot return to the Citadel.”
“Then get out of sight tonight and buy something tomorrow. Have you funds?”
“A trifle, yes.”
“Good. Buy something. Or steal, or strip the clothes from the next unfortunate you shorten with that thing. I’d have one of my fellows take you to an inn, but that would mean more staring and whispering still. There’s been some kind of trouble on the river, and they’re telling each other too many ghost stories out there already. Now the wind’s dying and a fog’s coming in—that will make it worse. Where are you going?”
“I am appointed to the town of Thrax.”
The peltast who had spoken before said, “Do you believe him, Lochage? He’s shown no proof that he’s what he claims.”
The lochage was looking out the window again, and now I too saw the threads of ochre mist. “If you can’t use your head, use your nose,” he said. “What odors entered with him?”
The peltast smiled uncertainly.
“Rusting iron, cold sweat, putrescent blood. An impostor would smell of new cloth, or rags picked from a trunk. If you don’t wake to your business soon, Petronax, you’ll be north fighting the Ascians.”
The peltast said, “But Lochage—” shooting such a look of hatred toward me that I thought he might attempt to do me some harm when I left the bartizan. “Show this fellow you are indeed of the torturers’ guild.” The peltast was relaxed, so there was no great difficulty. I knocked his shield aside with my right arm, putting my left foot on his right to pin him while I crushed that nerve in the neck that induces convulsions.
15. BALDANDERS
The city at the western end of the bridge was very different from the one I had left. At first there were flambeaux at the corners, and nearly as much coming and going of coaches and drays as there had been on the bridge itself. Before quitting the bartizan, I had asked the lochage’s advice about a place to spend what remained of the night; now, feeling the fatigue that had deserted me only briefly, I plodded along watching for the inn sign.
After a time the dark seemed to thicken with each step I took, and somewhere I must have taken the wrong turning. Unwilling to retrace my way, I tried to maintain a generally northerly route, comforting myself with the thought that though I might be lost, each stride carried me nearer Thrax. At last I discovered a small inn. I saw no sign and perhaps it had none, but I smelled cooking and heard the clink of tumblers, and I went in, throwing open the door and dropping into an old chair that stood near it without paying much attention to where I had come or whose company I had entered. When I had been sitting there long enough to get my breath and was wishing for a place where I could take off my boots (though I was far from ready to get up to look for one), three men who had been drinking in a corner got up and left; and an old man, seeing, I suppose, that I was going to be bad for his business, came over and asked what I wanted. I told him I required a room. “We have none.”
I said, “That’s just as well—I have no money to pay anyway.”
“Then you will have to leave.”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I’m too tired.” (Other journeymen had told me of playing this trick in the city.)
“You’re the carnifex, ain’t you? You take their heads off.”
“Bring me two of those fish I smell and you won’t have anything but the heads left.”
“I can call the City Guard. They’ll have you out.”
I knew from his tone that he did not believe what he said, so I told him to call away, but to bring me the fish in the meantime, and he went off grumbling. I sat up straighter then, with Terminus Est (which I had had to take from my shoulder to sit down) upright between my knees. There were five men still in the room with me, but none of them would meet my eye, and two soon left. The old man returned with a small fish that had expired upon a slice of coarse bread, and said, “Eat this and go.”
He stood and watched me while I had my supper. When I had finished it, I asked where I could sleep.
“No rooms. I told you.”
If a palace had stood with open doors half a chain away, I do not think I could have driven myself to leave that inn to go to it. I said, “I’ll sleep in this chair, then. You’re not likely to have more trade tonight anyway.”
“Wait,” he said, and left me. I heard him talking to a woman in another room.
When I woke, he was shaking me by the shoulder. “Will you sleep three in a bed?”
“With whom?”
“Two optimates, I swear to you. Very nice men, traveling together.”
The woman in the kitchen shouted something I could not understand.
“Did you hear that?” the old man continued. “One of them’s not even come in yet. This time of night, he probably won’t come at all. There’ll be just the two of you.”
“If these men have rented a bedchamber—”
“They won’t object, I promise. Truth is, Carnifex, they’re behind. Three nights here, and only paid for the first.”
So I was to be used as an eviction notice. That did not disturb me much, and in fact it seemed somewhat promising—if the man sleeping there tonight left, I would have the room to myself. I clambered to my feet and followed the old man up a crooked stair.
The room we entered was not locked, but it was as dark as a tomb. I could hear heavy breathing. “Goodman!” the old fellow bawled, forgetting he had said his tenant was an optimate. “What-do-you-call-yourself? Baldy? Baldanders? I brought company for you. If you won’t pay your rate, you got to take in boarders.” There was no reply.
“Here, Master Carnifex,” the old man said to me, “I’ll make you a light.” He puffed at a bit of punk until it was bright enough to ignite a stub of candle. The room was small, and held no furniture but a bed. In it, asleep on his side (as it appeared) with his back toward us and his legs drawn up, was the largest man I had ever seen—a man who might fairly have been called a giant. “Aren’t you going to wake, Goodman Baldanders, and see who your lodgemate might be?”
I wanted to go to bed and told the old man to leave us. He objected, but I pushed him out of the room and as soon as he was gone sat down on the unoccupied side of the bed and pulled off my boots and stockings. The weak light of the candle confirmed that I had developed several blisters. I took off my cloak and spread it on the worn counterpane. For a moment I considered whether I should take off my belt and trousers or sleep in them; prudence and weariness together urged the latter, and I noticed that the giant seemed fully dressed. With a feeling of inexpressible fatigue and relief I blew out the candle and lay down to spend the first night outside the Matachin Tower that I could recall.
“Never.”
The tone was so deep and resonant (almost like the lowest notes of an organ) that I was not certain at first what the meaning of the word had been, or even if it had been a
word at all. I mumbled, “What did you say?”
“Baldanders.”
“I know—the innkeeper told me. I’m Severian.” I was lying on my back, with Terminus Est (which I had brought into the bed for safekeeping) between us. In the dark, I could not tell whether my companion had rolled to face me or not, yet I was certain I would have felt any motion of that enormous frame. “You—strike off.”
“You heard us when we came in then. I thought you were asleep.” My lips shaped themselves to say I was no carnifex, but a journeyman of the torturers’ guild. Then I recalled my disgrace, and that Thrax has sent for an executioner. I said, “Yes, I’m a headsman, but you need not fear me. I only do what I am feed to do.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Yes, tomorrow will be time enough for us to meet and talk.”
And then I dreamed, though it may have been that Baldanders’ words, too, were a dream. Yet I do not think so, and if they were, it was a different dream. I bestrode a great, leather-winged being under a lowering sky. Just equipoised between the rack of cloud and a twilit land we slid down a hill of air. Hardly once, it seemed to me, the finger-winged soarer flapped her long pinions. The dying sun was before us, and it seemed we matched the speed of Urth, for it stood unmoving at the horizon, though we flew on and on. At last I saw a change in the land, and at first I thought it a desert. Far off, no cities or farms or woods or fields appeared, but only a level waste, a blackened purple in color, featureless and nearly static. The leathern-winged one observed it as well, or perhaps snatched some odor from the air. I felt iron muscles beneath me grow tense, and there were three wing strokes together. The purple waste showed flecks of white. After a time I became aware that its seeming stillness was a sham born of uniformity—it was the same everywhere, but everywhere in motion—the sea—the World-River Uroboros—cradling Urth. Then for the first time I looked behind me, seeing all the country of humankind swallowed in the night.
When it was gone, and there was everywhere beneath us the waste of rolling water and nothing more, the beast turned her head to regard me. Her beak was the beak of an ibis, her face the face of a hag; on her head was a miter of bone. For an instant we regarded each other, and I seemed to know her thought: You dream; but were you to wake from your waking, I would be there. Her motion changed as a lugger’s does when the sailors make it to come about on the opposite tack. One pinion dipped, the other rose until it pointed toward the sky, and I scrabbled at the scaled hide and plummeted into the sea.
The shock of the impact woke me. I twitched in every joint, and heard the giant mutter in his sleep. In much the same way I murmured too, and groped to find if my sword still lay at my side, and slept again.
The water closed over me, yet I did not drown. I felt I might breathe water, yet I did not breathe. Everything was so clear that I felt I fell through an emptiness more translucent than air.
Far off loomed great shapes—things hundreds of times larger than a man. Some seemed ships, and some clouds; one was a living head without a body; one had a hundred heads. A blue haze obscured them, and I saw below me a country of sand, carved by the currents. A palace stood there that was greater than our Citadel, but it was ruinous, its halls as unroofed as its gardens; through it moved immense figures, white as leprosy.
Nearer I fell, and they turned up their faces to me, faces such as I had seen once beneath Gyoll; they were women, naked, with hair of sea-foam green and eyes of coral. Laughing, they watched me fall, and their laughter came bubbling up to me. Their teeth were white and pointed, each a finger’s length. I fell nearer. Their hands reached up to me and stroked me as a mother strokes her child. The gardens of the palace held sponges and sea anemones and countless other beauties to which I could put no name. The great women circled me round, and I was only a doll before them. “Who are you?” I asked. “And what do you do here?”
“We are the brides of Abaia. The sweethearts and playthings, the toys and valentines of Abaia. The land could not hold us. Our breasts are battering rams, our buttocks would break the backs of bulls. Here we feed, floating and growing, until we are great enough to mate with Abaia, who will one day devour the continents.”
“And who am I?”
Then they laughed all together, and their laughter was like surf upon a beach of glass. “We will show you,” they said. “We will show you!” One took me by each hand, as sisters take their sister’s child, and lifted me up, and swam with me through the garden. Their fingers were webbed, and as long as my arm from shoulder to elbow.
They halted, settling through the water like carracks sinking, until their feet and mine touched the strand. There stood before us a low wall, and on it a little stage and curtain, such as are used for children’s entertainments. Our roiling of the water seemed to flutter the kerchief-sized cloth. It rippled and swayed, and began to draw back as though teased by an unseen hand. At once there appeared the tiny figure of a man of sticks. His limbs were twigs, still showing bark and green bud. His body was a quarter-span of branch, big through as my thumb, and his head a knot whose whorls formed his eyes and mouth. He carried a club (which he brandished at us) and moved as if he were alive. When the wooden man had jumped for us, and struck the little stage with his weapon to show his ferocity, there appeared the figure of a boy armed with a sword. This marionette was as finely finished as the other was crude—it might have been a real child reduced to the size of a mouse. After both had bowed to us, the tiny figures fought. The wooden man performed prodigious leaps and seemed to fill the stage with the blows of his cudgel; the boy danced like a dust mote in a sunbeam to avoid it, darting at the wooden man to slash with his pin-sized blade.
At last the wooden figure collapsed. The boy strode over as if to set his foot upon its chest; but before he could do so, the wooden figure floated from the stage, and turning limply and lazily rose until it vanished from sight, leaving behind the boy, and the cudgel and the sword—both broken. I seemed to hear (no doubt it was really the squeaking of cartwheels on the street outside) a flourish of toy trumpets.
I woke because a third person had come into the room. He was a small, brisk man with fiery red hair, well and even foppishly dressed. When he saw me awake, he threw back the shutters that had covered the window, bringing red sunlight streaming in.
“My partner,” he said, “sleeps soundly always. His snoring didn’t deafen you?”
“I slept well myself,” I told him. “And if he snored, I didn’t hear him,” That seemed to please the small man, who showed a good many gold teeth when he smiled. “He does. He snores to shake Urth, I assure you. Happy you got your rest anyway.” He extended a delicate, well-cared-for hand. “I am Dr. Talos.”
“The Journeyman Severian.” I threw off the thin coverings and stood up to take it.
“You wear black, I see. What guild is that?”
“It is the fuligin of the torturers.”
“Ah!” He cocked his head to one side like a thrush, and hopped about to look at me from various angles. “You’re a tall fellow—that’s a shame—but all that sooty stuff is very impressive.”
“We find it practical,” I said. “The oubliette is a dirty place, and fuligin doesn’t show bloodstains.”
“You have humor! That’s excellent! There are few advantages, I’ll tell you, that profit a man more than humor. Humor will draw a crowd. Humor will calm a mob or reassure a nursery school. Humor will get you on and get you off, and pull in asimis like a magnet.”
I had only the vaguest idea of what he was saying, but seeing that he was in an affable mood, I ventured, “I hope I didn’t discommode you? The landlord said I was to sleep here, and there was room for another person in the bed.”
“No, no, not at all! I never came back—found a better place to pass the night. I sleep very little, I may as well tell you, and I’m a light sleeper too. But I had a good night of it, an excellent night. Where are you going this morning, optirnate?”
I was fumbling under the bed for my boots
. “First to look for some breakfast, I suppose. After that, out of the city, to the north.”
“Excellent! No doubt my partner would appreciate a breakfast—it will do him a world of good. And we’re traveling north. After a most successful tour of the city, you know. Going back home now. Played the east bank down, and playing the west up. Perhaps we’ll stop at the House Absolute on our way north. That’s the dream, you know, in the profession. Play the Autarch’s palace. Or come back, if you’ve already played there. Chrisos by the hatful.”
“I’ve met one other person, at least, who dreamed of going back,”
“Don’t put on that long face—you must tell me about him sometime. But now, if we’re to go to breakfast—Baldanders! Wake up! Come, Baldanders, come! Wake up!” He danced to the foot of the bed and grasped the giant by an ankle. “Baldanders! Don’t take him by the shoulder, optimate!” (I had made no motion to do so.) “He thrashes about sometimes. BALDANDERS!” The giant murmured and stirred.
“A new day, Baldanders! Still alive! Time to eat and defecate and make love—all that! Up now, or we’ll never get home.”
There was no sign that the giant had heard him. It was as if the murmur of the moment before had been only a protest voiced in a dream, or his death rattle. Dr. Talos seized the foul blankets with both hands and swept them back. The monstrous shape of his partner lay revealed. He was even taller than I had supposed, nearly too tall for the bed, though he slept with his knees drawn almost to his chin. His shoulders were an ell across, high and hunched. His face I could not see; it lay buried in his pillow. There were strange scars about his neck and ears.
“Baldanders!”
His hair was grizzled, and despite the innkeeper’s pretended error, very thick.
“Baldanders! Your pardon, optimate, but may I borrow that sword?”
“No,” I said. “You may not.”
“Oh, I’m not going to kill him, or anything of that sort. I only want to use the flat of it.”
I shook my head, and when Dr. Talos saw I was still adamant, he began to rummage about the room. “Left my stick downstairs. Vile custom, they’ll thieve it. I should learn to limp, I really should. There’s nothing here at all.” He darted out the door, and was back in a moment carrying an ironwood walking stick with a gilt-brass knob. “Now then! Baldanders! “ The strokes fell upon the giant’s broad back like the big raindrops that precede a thunderstorm. Quite suddenly, the giant sat up. “I’m awake, Doctor.” His face was large and coarse, but sensitive and sad as well. “Have you decided to kill me at last?”