by Gene Wolfe
Look at the water slopping at your boots.”
I did. It was as brown as tea.
“It has the property of preserving corpses. The bodies are weighed by forcing lead shot down their throats, then sunk here with their positions mapped so they can be fished up again later if anyone wants to look at them.” I would readily have sworn that there was no one within a league of where we stood. Or at least (if the segments of the glass building really confined the spaces they enclosed as they were supposed to do) within the borders of the Garden of Endless Sleep. But Agia had no sooner said what she did than the head and shoulders of an old man appeared over the top of some reeds a dozen paces off. “ ‘Tis not true,” he called. “I know they say so, but ‘tisn’t right.” Agia, who had allowed the torn bodice of her gown to hang as it would, quickly drew it up again. “I didn’t know I was talking to anyone but my escort here.” The old man ignored the rebuke. No doubt his thoughts were already too involved with the remark he had overheard for him to pay much heed. “I’ve the figure here—would you like to see it? You, young sieur—you’ve an education, anyone can tell that. Will you look?” He appeared to be carrying a staff. I watched its head rise and fall several times before I understood that he was poling toward us.
“More trouble,” Agia said. “We’d better go.”
I asked if it might not be possible for the old man to ferry us across the lake, thus saving us the long walk around.
He shook his head. “Too heavy for my little boat. There’s but room for Cas and me here. You great folk would capsize us.”
The prow came into sight, and I saw that what he said was true: the skiff was so small it seemed almost too much to ask of it that it keep the old man himself afloat, though he was bowed and shrunken by age (he appeared older even than Master Palaemon) until he could hardly have weighed more than a boy of ten. There was no one in it with him.
“Your pardon, sieur,” he said. “But I can’t come no nearer. Wet she may be, but she gets too dry for me, or you couldn’t walk upon it. Can you step here by the edge so’s I can show you my figure?”
I was curious to see what it was he wanted of us, so I did as he asked, Agia following me reluctantly.
“Here now.” Reaching into his tunic he pulled out a small scroll. “Here is the position. Have a look, young sieur.”
The scroll was headed with some name and a long description of where this person had lived, whose wife she was, and what her husband had done for a living; all of which I only pretended to glance at, I am afraid. Below the description were a crude map and two numbers.
“Now you see, sieur, it ought to be easy enough. First number there, that’s paces over from the Fulstrum. Second number’s paces up. Now would you believe that for all these years I’ve been trying to find her, and never found her yet?” Looking at Agia, he drew himself up until he stood almost normally.
“I’d believe it,” Agia said. “And if it will satisfy you, I’m sorry to hear it.
But it has nothing to do with us.”
She turned to go, but the old man thrust out his pole to prevent my following her. “Don’t you heed what they say. They put them where the figure shows, but they don’t stay there. Some has been see’d in the river, even.” He looked vaguely toward the horizon. “Out there.”
I told him I doubted that was possible.
“All the water here, where’d you think it come from? There’s a conduit underground that brings it, and if it didn’t this whole place’d dry out. When they get to moving about, what’s to prevent one from swimming through? What’s to prevent twenty? Can’t be any current to speak of. You and her—you come to get a avern, did you? You know why they planted ‘em here to begin with?” I shook my head.
“For the manatees. They’re in the river, and used to swim in through the conduit. It scared the kin to see their faces bobbing in the lake, so Father Inire had the gardeners plant the averns. I was here and saw it. Just a little man he is, with a wry neck and bow legs. If a manatee comes now, those flowers kill it in the night. One morning I come looking for Cas like I always do unless I’ve something else I have to take care of, and there was two curators on the shore with a harpoon. Dead manatee in the lake, they said. I went out with my hook and got it, and it wasn’t no manatee, but a man. He’d spit up his lead, or they hadn’t put enough in. Looked as good as you or her, and better than me.”
“Had he been dead long?”
“No way of telling, for the water here pickles them. You’ll hear it said it turns their skin to leather, and so it does. But don’t think of the sole of your boot when you hear it. More like a woman’s glove.” Agia was far ahead of us, and I began to walk after her. The old man followed us, poling his skiff parallel to the floating path of sedge. “I told them I’d had better luck in one day for them than I’ve had in forty years for myself. Here’s what I use.” He held up an iron grapple on a length of rope. “Not that I haven’t caught aplenty, all kinds. But not Cas. I started where the figure showed, year after she died. She wasn’t there, so I kept working my way out. After five years of that I was a ways far away—that’s what I thought then—from what it said. I got to be afraid she might be there after all, so I begun over. First where it said, then working out. Ten years of that. I got to be afraid again, so what I do now is start in the morning where it says, and make my first cast there. After that I go to where I stopped the last time, and circle out some more. She’s not where it says—I know that, I know everyone that’s there now, and some of them I’ve pulled up a hundred times. But she’s wandering, and I keep thinking maybe she’ll come home.”
“She was your wife?”
The old man nodded, and to my surprise said nothing.
“Why do you want to recover her body?”
Still he said nothing. His pole made no sound as it slipped in and out of the water; the skiff left only the faintest of wakes behind it, tiny ripples that lapped the side of the sedge track like the tongues of kittens. “Are you sure you would know her, after so long a time, if you found her?”
“Yes… yes.” He nodded, slowly at first, then vigorously. “You’re thinking I may have hooked her already. Drug her up, looked her in the face, and throwed her back in. Ain’t you? It ain’t possible. Not know Cas? You wondered why I want her back. One reason is the memory I have of her—the one that’s strongest—is of this brown water closing over her face. Her eyes shut. Do you know about that?”
“I’m not certain I know what you mean.”
“They’ve a cement they put on the lids. It’s supposed to hold them down forever, but when the water hit them, they opened. Explain that. It’s what I remember, what comes into my mind when I try to sleep. This brown water rolling over her face, and her eyes opening blue through the brown. I have to go to sleep five, six times every night, what with the waking up. Before I lie down here myself I’d like to have another picture there—her face coming back up, even if it’s only on the end of my hook. You follow what I say?” I thought of Thecla and the trickle of blood from beneath the door of her cell, and I nodded.
“Then there’s the other thing. Cas and I, we had a little shop. Cloisonne-work, mostly. Her father and brother had the trade of making it, and they set us up on Signal Street, just past the middle, next to the auction house. The building’s still there, though nobody lives in it. I’d go over to the inlaws and carry the boxes home on my back, and pull them open, and put the pieces on our shelves. Cas priced ‘em, sold, and kept everything so clean! You know how long we did that? Run our little place?”
I shook my head.
“Four years, less a month and a week. Then she died. Cas died. It wasn’t long before it was all gone, but it was the biggest part of my life. I’ve got a place to sleep in a loft now. A man I knew years before, though that was years after Cas was gone, he lets me sleep there. There isn’t a piece of cloisonne in it, or a garment, or so much as a nail from the old shop. I tried to keep a locket and Cas’s combs, but everything�
�s gone. Tell me this, now. How am I to know it wasn’t no dream?”
It seemed to me that the old man might be spell-caught, as the people in the house of yellow wood had been; so I said, “I have no way of knowing. Perhaps, as you say, it was a dream. I think you torment yourself too much.” His mood changed in an instant, as I have seen the moods of young children do, and he laughed. “It’s easy to see, sieur, that despite the outfit under that mantle, you’re no torturer. I do truly wish I could ferry you and your doxie. Since I can’t, there’s a fellow farther along that has a bigger boat. He comes here pretty often, and he talks to me sometimes like you did. Tell him I hope he’ll take you across.
I thanked him and hurried after Agia, who by this time was a great distance ahead. She was limping, and I recalled how far she had walked today after wrenching her leg. As I was about to overtake her and give her my arm, I made one of those missteps that seem disastrous and enormously humiliating at the time, though one laughs at them afterward; and in so doing I set in motion one of the strangest incidents of my admittedly strange career. I began to run, and in running came too near the inner side of a curve in the track. At one moment I was bounding along on the springy sedge—at the next I was floundering in icy brown water, much impeded by my mantle. For the space of a breath I knew again the terror of drowning; then I righted myself and got my face above water. The habits developed on all those summer swims in Gyoll reasserted themselves: I blew the water from my nose and mouth, took a deep breath, and pushed my sopping hood back from my face. I was no sooner calm than I realized that I had dropped Terminus Est, and at that moment losing that blade seemed more terrible than the chance of death. I dove, not even troubling to kick off my boots, forcing my way through an umber fluid that was not water purely, but water laced and thickened with the fibrous stems of the reeds. These stems, though they multiplied the threat of drowning many times, saved Terminus Est for me—she would surely have outraced me to the bottom and buried herself in the mud there despite the meager air retained in her sheath, if her fall had not been obstructed. As it was, eight or ten cubits beneath the surface one frantically groping hand encountered the blessed, familiar shape of her onyx grip.
At the same instant, my other hand touched an object of a completely different kind. It was another human hand, and its grasp (for it had seized my own the moment I touched it) coincided so perfectly with the recovery of Terminus Est that it seemed the hand’s owner was returning my property to me, like the tall mistress of the Pelerines. I felt a surge of lunatic gratitude, then fear returned tenfold: the hand was pulling my own, drawing me down.
23. HILDEGRIN
With what must surely have been the last strength I possessed, I managed to throw Terminus Est onto the floating track of sedge and grasp its ragged margin before I sank again.
Someone caught me by the wrist. I looked up expecting Agia; it was not she but a woman younger still, with streaming yellow hair. I strove to thank her, but water, not words, poured from my mouth. She tugged and I struggled, and at last I lay wholly sup-ported on the sedge, so weak I could do nothing more. I must have rested there at least as long as it takes to say the angelus, and perhaps longer. I was conscious of the cold, which grew worse, and of the sagging of the whole fabric of rotting plants, which bent beneath my weight until I was half submerged again. I breathed in great gasps that failed to satisfy my lungs, and coughed water; water trickled from my nostrils too. Someone (it was a man’s voice, a loud one I seemed to have heard a long time before) said, “Pull him over or he’ll sink.” I was lifted by my belt. In a few moments more I was able to stand, though my legs trembled so I feared I would fall.
Agia was there, and the blond girl who had helped me onto the sedge, and a big, beef-faced man. Agia asked what had happened, and half-conscious though I was I noticed how pale she was.
“Give him time,” the big man said. “He’ll be all right soon enough.” And then, “Who in Phlegethon are you?”
He was looking at the girl, who seemed as dazed as I felt. She made a stammering sound, “D-d-d-d,” then hung her head and was silent. From hair to heels she was smeared with mud, and what clothing she had seemed no better than rags. The big man asked Agia, “Where did that one come from?”
“I don’t know. When I looked back to see what was keeping Severian, she was pulling him onto this floating path.”
“Good thing she did, too. Good for him, anyway. Is she mad? Or chant-caught here, you think?”
I said, “Whatever she is, she saved me. Can’t you give her something to cover herself with? She must be freezing.” I was freezing myself, now that I was alive enough to notice it.
The big man shook his head, and seemed to draw his heavy coat about him more closely. “Not unless she gets clean I won’t. And she won’t unless she’s put back in the water, and stirred around, too. But I’ve something here that’s the next best thing, and maybe better.” From one of his coat pockets he took a metal flask shaped like a dog, which he handed to me.
A bone in the dog’s mouth proved to be the stopper. I offered the flask to the blond girl, who at first seemed not to know what to do with it. Agia took it from her and held it to her lips until she had taken several swallows, then handed it back to me. The contents seemed to be plum brandy; its fiery impact washed away the bitterness of the fen water very pleasantly. By the time I replaced the bone in the dog’s mouth, his belly was, I think, better than half empty.
“Now then,” said the big man, “I think you people ought to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here—and don’t none of you say you’ve just come to see the sights of the garden. I see enough gawkers these days to know them before they come in hailing distance.” He looked at me. “That’s a good big whittle you’ve got there, to begin with.”
Agia said, “The armiger is in costume. He has been challenged, and has come to cut an avern.”
“He’s in costume and you aren’t, I suppose. Do you think I don’t know stage brocade? And bare feet too, when I see them?”
“I never said I was not in costume, nor that I was of his rank. As for my shoes, I left them outside so as not to ruin them in this water.” The big man nodded in a way that gave no clue as to whether he believed her or not. “Now you, goldy-hair. The embroidered baggage here has already said she don’t know you. And from the look of him, I don’t believe her fish—that you pulled out for her, and a good piece of work that was, too—knows any more than I do. Maybe not that much. So who are you?”
The blond girl swallowed. “Dorcas.”
“And how’d you get here, Dorcas? And how’d you get in the water? For that’s where you’ve been, plainly. You couldn’t of got that wet just pulling out our young friend.”
The brandy had brought a flush to the girl’s cheeks, but her face was as vacant and bewildered as before, or nearly so. “I don’t know,” she whispered. Agia asked, “You don’t remember coming here?”
Dorcas shook her head.
“Then what’s the last thing you do remember?”
There was a long silence. The wind seemed to be blowing harder than ever, and despite the drink, I was miserably cold. At last Dorcas murmured, “Sitting by a window… There were pretty things in the window. Trays and boxes, and a rood.”
The big man said, “Pretty things? Well, if you was there, I’m assured there was.”
“She’s mad,” Agia said. “Either someone’s been taking care of her and she’s wandered away, or no one is taking care of her, which seems more likely from the state of her clothes, and she wandered in here when the curators weren’t looking.”
“It may be somebody’s cracked her over the head, took her things, and threw her in here thinking she was gone. There’s more ways in, Mistress Slops, than the curator knows of. Or maybe somebody brought her in to be sunk when she was only sick and sleepin’. In a com’er, as they call it, and the water woke her up.”
“Surely whoever brought her in would have seen her.”
; “They can stay under a long time in a com’er, so I’ve heard. But whichever way it was, it don’t much matter now. Here she is, and it’s up to her, I should say, to find out where she come from and who she is.”
I had dropped the brown mantle and was tyying to wring my guild cloak dry; but I looked up when Agia said, “You’ve been asking all of us who we are. Who are you?”
“You’ve every right to know,” the big man said. “Every right in the world, and I’ll give you better bona fides than any of you have given me. Only after I does so, I must be about my own business. I come because I saw the young armiger here drowning, like any good man would. But I’ve my own affairs to take care of, the same as the next.”
With that he pulled off his tall hat, and reaching inside produced a greasy card about twice the size of the calling cards I had occasionally seen in the Citadel. He handed it to Agia, and I peered over her shoulder. In florid script, the legend read:
HILDEGRIN THE BADGER
Excavations of all kinds, by a single
digger or 20 score.
Stone is not too hard nor mud too soft.
Ask on Argosy Street at the sign of the
BLIND SHOVEL
Or inquire at the Alticamelus around
the corner on Velleity.
“And that’s who I am, Mistress Slops and young sieur—which I hope you won’t mind my calling you, firstly because you’re younger nor me, and secondly because you’re a sight younger than what she is, for all you was probably born only a couple years sooner. And I’ll be on my way.
I stopped him. “Before I fell in, I met an old man in a skiff who told me there was someone farther down the track who could ferry us across the lake. I think you must be the man he referred to. Will you take us?”
“Ah, the one what’s lookin’ for his wife, poor soul. Well, he’s been a good friend to me many a time, so if he recommends you, I suppose I’d better do it. My scow will hold four in a pinch.”