by Gene Wolfe
The fiacre reeled and plunged into a narrow gateway in a barrier of shrubbery. An immense building loomed before us. The driver tried to turn his animals, but it was too late. We hit its side; it gave like the fabric of a dream, and we were in a cavernous space, dimly lit and smelling of hay. Ahead was a stepped altar as large as a cottage and dotted with blue lights. I saw it and realized I was seeing it too well—our driver had been swept out of his seat or had jumped clear. Agia shrieked.
We crashed into the altar. There was a confusion of flying objects impossible to describe, the sense of everything whirling and tumbling and never colliding, as in the chaos before creation. The ground seemed to leap at me; it struck with an impact that set my ears humming.
I had been holding Terminus Est, I think, while I flew through the air, but she was no longer in my hand. When I tried to get up to look for her, I had no breath and no strength. Somewhere far off, a man shouted. I rolled on my side, then managed to get my lifeless legs beneath me.
We seemed to be near the center of the building, which was as big around as the Great Keep and yet completely empty: without interior walls, stairs, or furniture of any kind. Through the golden, dusty air I could see crooked pillars that seemed of painted wood. Lamps, mere points of light, hung a chain or more overhead. Far above them, a many-colored roof rippled and snapped in a wind I could not feel.
I stood on straw, and straw was spread everywhere in an endless yellow carpet, like the field of a titan after harvest. All about me were the battens of which the altar had been constructed: fragments of thin wood braved with gold leaf and set with turquoises and violet amethysts. With some vague idea of finding my sword, I began to walk, stumbling almost at once over the smashed body of the fiacre. One onegar lay not far from it; I recall thinking it must have broken its neck. Someone called, “Torturer!” and I looked around and saw Agia—standing erect, though shakily. I asked if she were all right. “Alive, anyway, but we must leave this place at once. Is that animal dead?”
I nodded.
“I could have ridden on it. Now you’ll have to carry me if you can. I don’t think my right leg will bear my weight.” She tottered as she spoke, and I had to spring to her and catch her to keep her from falling. “Now we have to go,” she said. “Look around… can you see a door? Quickly!” I could not. “Why is it so urgent that we leave?”
“Use your nose if you can’t use your eyes to see this floor.” I sniffed. The odor in the air was no longer straw, but straw burning; at almost the same instant I saw the flames, bright in the gloom, but still so small that a few moments before they must have been mere sparks. I tried to run, but could manage nothing better than a limping walk. “Where are we?”
“It’s the Cathedral of the Pelerines—some call it the Cathedral of the Claw. The Pelerines are a band of priestesses who travel the continent. They never—” Agia broke off because we were approaching a cluster of scarlet-clad people. Or perhaps they were approaching us, for they seemed to me to have appeared in the middle distance without warning. The men had shaven heads and held gleaming scimitars curved like the young moon and blazing with gilding; a woman with the towering height of an exultant cradled a sheathed twohanded sword: my own Terminus Est. She wore a hood and a narrow cape that trailed long tassels. Agia began, “Our animals ran wild, Holy Domnicellae…”
“That is of no moment,” the woman who held my sword said. There was much beauty in her, but it was not the beauty of women who quench desire. “This belongs to the man carrying you. Tell him to set you on your feet and take it. You can walk.”
“A little. Do as she says, Torturer.”
“Don’t you know his name?”
“He told me, but I’ve forgotten.”
I said, “Severian,” and steadied her with one hand while I accepted Terminus Est with the other.
“Use it to end quarrels,” the woman in scarlet said. “Not to begin them.”
“The straw floor of this great tent is on fire, Chatelaine. Do you know it?”
“It will be extinguished. The sisters and our servants are crushing the embers now.” She paused, her gaze flickering from Agia to me and back to Agia again. “In the remains of our high altar, which your vehicle destroyed, we found only one thing that seemed yours, and likely to be of value to you—that sword. We have returned it. Will you now also return to us anything of value to us you may have found?”
I remembered the amethysts. “I found nothing of value, Chatelaine.” Agia shook her head, and I continued, “There were splinters of wood set with precious stones, but I left them where they had fallen.”
The men shifted the hilts of their weapons in the hands and sought good footing, but the tall woman stood motionless, staring at me, then at Agia, then at me once more. “Come to me, Severian.”
I came forward, a matter of three or four paces. It was a great temptation to draw Terminus Est as a defense against the men’s blades, but I resisted it. Their mistress took my wrists in her hands and looked into my eyes. Her own were calm, and in the strange light seemed hard as beryls. “There is no guilt in him,” she said.
One of the men muttered, “You are mistaken, Domnicellae.”
“No guilt, I say. Step back, Severian, and let the woman come forward.” I did as she told me, and Agia limped to within a long pace of her. When she would not come nearer, the tall woman came to her and took her wrists as she had mine. After a moment, she glanced toward the other women who had waited behind the swordsmen. Before I realized what was happening, two of them seized Agia’s gown and drew it over her head and away. One said, “Nothing, Mother.”
“I think this the day foretold.”
Her hands crossed over her breasts, Agia whispered to me, “These Pelerines are insane. Everyone knows it, and if I had had more time I would have told you so.” The tall woman said, “Return her rags. The Claw has not vanished in living memory, but it does so at will and it would be neither possible nor permissible for us to stop it.”
One of the women murmured, “We may find it in the wreckage still, Mother.” A second added, “Should they not be made to pay?”
“Let us kill them,” a man said.
The tall woman gave no indication that she had heard any of them. She was already leaving us, seeming to glide across the straw. The women followed her, looking at one another, and the men lowered their gleaming blades and backed away.
Agia was struggling into her gown. I asked her what she knew of the Claw, and who these Pelerines were.
“Get me out of here, Severian, and I’ll tell you. It isn’t lucky to talk of them in their own place. Is that a tear in the wall over there?” We walked in the direction she had indicated, stumbling sometimes in the soft straw. There was no opening, but I was able to lift the edge of the silken wall enough for us to slip under.
19. THE BOTANIC GARDENS
The sunlight was blinding; it seemed as if we had stepped from twilight into full day. Golden particles of straw swam in the crisp air about us. “That’s better,” Agia said. “Wait a moment now and let me get my bearings. I think the Adamnian Steps will be to our right. Our driver wouldn’t have gone down them—or perhaps he would, the fellow was mad—but they should take us to the landing by the shortest route. Give me your arm again, Severian. My leg’s not quite recovered.”
We were walking on grass now, and I saw that the tentcathedral had been pitched on a champian surrounded by semi-fortified houses; its insubstantial belfries looked down upon their parapets. A wide, paved street bordered the open lawn, and when we reached it I asked again who the Pelerines were. Agia looked sidelong at me. “You must forgive me, but I don’t find it easy to talk of professional virgins to a man who’s just seen me naked. Though under other circumstances it might be different.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t really know a great deal about them, but we have some of their habits in the shop, and I asked my brother about them once, and after that paid attention to whatever I heard. It’s a popular costume for ma
sques—all that red. “Anyway, they are an order of conventionals, as no doubt you’ve already discerned. The red is for the descending light of the New Sun, and they descend on landowners, traveling around the country with their cathedral and seming enough to set it up. Their order claims to possess the most valuable relic in existence, the Claw of the Conciliator, so the red may be for the Wounds of the Claw as well.”
Trying to be facetious I said, “I didn’t know he had claws.”
“It isn’t a real claw—it’s said to be a gem. You must have heard of it. I don’t understand why it’s called the Claw, and I doubt that those priestesses do themselves. But assuming it to have had some real association with the Conciliator, you can appreciate its importance. After all, our knowledge of him now is purely historical—meaning that we either confirm or deny that he was in contact with our race in the remote past. If the Claw is what the Pelerines represent it to be, then he once lived, though he may be dead now.” A startled glance from a woman carrying a dulcimer told me the mantle I had bought from Agia’s brother was in disarray, permitting the fuligin of my guild cloak (which must have looked like mere empty darkness to the poor woman) to be seen through the opening, As I rearranged it and reclasped the fibula I said, “Like all these religious arguments, this one gets less significant as we continue. Supposing the Conciliator to have walked among us eons ago, and to be dead now, of what importance is he save to historians and fanatics? I value his legend as a part of the sacred past, but it seems to me that it is the legend that matters today, and not the Conciliator’s dust.”
Agia rubbed her hands, seeming to warm them in the sunlight. “Supposing him—we turn at this corner, Severian, you may see the head of the stair, if you’ll look, there where the statues of the eponyms stand—supposing him to have lived, he was by definition the Master of Power. Which means the transcendence of reality, and includes the negation of time. Isn’t that correct?” I nodded.
“Then there is nothing to prevent him, from a position, say, of thirty thousand years ago, coming into what we call the present. Dead or not, if he ever existed, he could be around the next bend of the street or the next turn of the week.”
We had reached the beginning of the stair. The steps were of stone as white as salt, sometimes so gradual that several strides were needed to go from one descent to the next, sometimes almost as abrupt as a ladder. Confectioners, sellers of apes, and the like had set up their stands here and there. For whatever reason, it was very pleasant to discuss mysteries with Agia while descending these steps, and I said, “All this because those women say they possess one of his glittering fingernails. I suppose it performs miraculous cures?”
“On occasion, so they claim. It also forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust, and so on. All the things he is supposed to have done himself.”
“You’re laughing at me now.”
“No, only laughing at the sunshine—you know what it is supposed to do to women’s faces.”
“Make them brown.”
“Make them ugly. To begin with, it dries the skin and creates wrinkles and so on. Then too, it shows up every little defect. Urvasi loved Pururavas, you know, before she saw him in a bright light. Anyway, I felt it on my face, and I was thinking, ‘I don’t care for you. I’m still too young to worry about you, and next year I’ll get a wide hat from our stock.’ “ Agia’s face was far from perfect now in the clear sunshine, but she had nothing to fear’ from it. My hunger fed at least as ravenously upon her imperfections. She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most appealing of all human qualities; and I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me.
“Anyway,” she continued, squeezing my hand, “I have to admit I’ve never understood why people like the Pelerines always think ordinary people have to have their lust purified. In my experience, they control it well enough by themselves, and just about every day, too. What most of us need is to find someone we can unbottle it with.”
“Then you care that I love you.” I was only half joking.
“Every woman cares if she’s loved, and the more men who love her, the better! But I don’t choose to love you in return, if that’s what you mean. It would be so easy today, going around the city with you like this. But then if you’re killed this evening, I’ll feel badly for a fortnight.”
“So will I,” I said.
“No you won’t. You won’t even care. Not about that or anything, not ever again.
Being dead doesn’t hurt, as you of all people should know.”
“I’m almost inclined to think this whole affair is some trick of yours, or of your brother’s. You were outside when the Septentrion came—did you tell him something to inflame him against me? Is he your lover?” Agia laughed at that, her teeth flashing in the sun. “Look at me. I have a brocade gown, but you’ve seen what’s beneath it. My feet are bare. Do you see rings or earrings? A silver lamia twined about my neck? Are my arms constricted with circlets of gold? If not, you may safely assume I have no officer of the Household Troops for my paramour. There’s an old sailor, ugly and poor, who presses me to live with him. Other than that, well, Agilus and I own our shop. It was bequeathed to us by our mother, and it’s free of debt only because we can find no one who’s enough of a fool to lend anything on it. Sometimes we rip up something from our stock and sell it to the paper-makers so we can buy a bowl of lentils to divide between us.”
“You should eat well tonight anyway,” I told her. “I gave your brother a good price for this mantle.”
“What?” Her good humor seemed to have returned. She took a step back and feigned astonishment with an open mouth. “You won’t buy me a supper this evening? After I’ve spent the day counseling you and guiding you about?”
“Involving me in the destruction of the altar those Pelerines had erected.”
“I’m sorry about that. I really am. I didn’t want you to tire your legs—you’ll need them when you fight. Then those others came up, and I thought I saw a chance for you to make some money.
Her look had left my face and come to rest on one of the brutal busts that flanked the stair. I asked, “Is that really all there was to it?”
“To confess the truth, I wanted them to go on thinking you might be an armiger. Armigers go about in fancy dress so much because they’re always going to fetes and tournaments, and you have the face. That’s why I thought so myself when I first saw you. And you see, if you were, then I was someone that somebody like that, an armiger and probably the bastard of an exultant, might care for. Even if it was only a kind of joke. I had no way of knowing what would happen.”
“I understand,” I said. Suddenly laughter overcame me. “What fools we must have looked, jolting along in the fiacre.”
“If you understand, then kiss me.”
I stared at her.
“Kiss me! How many chances have you left? I’ll give you more, what you want—” She paused, then laughed too. “After supper, perhaps. If we can find a private spot, though it won’t be good for your fighting.” She threw herself into my arms then, rising on her toes to press my lips. Her breasts were firm and high, and I could feel the motion of her hips.
“There now.” She pushed me away. “Look down there, Severian. Between the pylons.
What do you see?”
Water glimmered like a mirror in the sun. “The river.”
“Yes, Gyoll. Now to the left. Because there are so many nenuphars, the island is hard to see. But the lawn is a lighter, brighter green. Don’t you see the glass? Where it catches the light?”
“I see something. Is the building all glass?”
She nodded. “That’s the Botanic Gardens, where we’re going. They’ll let you cut your avern there—all you have to do is demand it as your right.” We made the rest of the descent in silence. The Adamnian Steps wind back and forth across a long hillside, and they are a favored place for strollers, who often hire a ride to th
e top and descend. I saw many couples finely dressed, men with the marks of old difficulties scarring their faces, and romping children. Saddening me more, I saw too from several points the dark towers of the Citadel on the opposite bank, and on the second or third such sighting it came to me that when I had swum from the eastern bank, diving from the water-stairs and fighting with the tenement children, I had once or twice noticed this narrow line of white on the other shore, so far upstream as to be nearly beyond sight.
The Botanic Gardens stood on an island near the bank, enclosed in a building of glass (a thing I had not seen before and did not know could exist). There were no towers or battlements: only the faceted tholus, climbing until it lost itself against the sky and its momentary brilliancies were confounded with the faint star’s. I asked Agia if we would have time to see the gardens—and then, before she could reply, told her that I would see them whether there was time or not. The fact was that I had no compunction about arriving late for my death, and was beginning to have difficulty in taking seriously a combat fought with flowers. “If you wish to spend your last afternoon visiting the gardens, so be it,” she said. “I come here myself often. It’s free, being maintained by the Antarch, and entertaining if you’re not too squeamish.”
We went up steps of glass, palely green. I asked Agia if the enormous building existed only to provide blooms and fruit.