by Gene Wolfe
I said, “I’ll remember, Master.”
“Of course it’s a poison. They all are, and this is the best — a little more than that would kill you. And you mustn’t take it again until the moon changes, understand?”
“Perhaps you’d better have Brother Corbinian weigh the dose, Master.” Corbinian was our apothecary; I was terrified that Master Gurloes might swallow a spoonful before my eyes.
“Me? I don’t need it.” Contemptuously, he put the lid on the jar again and banged it down on its shelf in the cabinet.
“That’s well, Master.”
“Besides,” (he winked at me), “I’ll have this.” From his sabretache he took an iron phallus. It was about a span and a half long and had a leather thong through the end opposite the tip.
It must seem idiotic to you who read this, but for an instant I could not imagine what the thing was for, despite the somewhat exaggerated realism of its design. I had a wild notion that the wine had rendered him childish, as a little boy is who supposes there is no essential difference between his wooden mount and a real animal. I wanted to laugh.
“’Abuse,’ that’s their word. That, you see, is where they’ve left us an out.” He had slapped the iron phallus against his palm — the same gesture, now that I think of it, that the man-ape who had threatened me had made with his mace. Then I had understood and had been gripped by revulsion.
But even that revulsion was not the emotion I would feel now in the same situation. I did not sympathize with the client, because I did not think of her at all; it was only a sort of repugnance for Master Gurloes, who with all his bulk and great strength was forced to rely on the brown powder, and still worse, on the iron phallus I had seen, an object that might have been sawed from a statue, and perhaps had been. Yet I saw him on another occasion, when the thing had to be done immediately for fear the order could not otherwise be carried out before the client died, act at once, and without powder or phallus, and without difficulty.
Master Gurloes was a coward then. Still, perhaps his cowardice was better than the courage I would have possessed in his position, for courage is not always a virtue. I had been courageous (as such things are counted) when I had fought the man-apes, but my courage was no more than a mixture of foolhardiness, surprise, and desperation; now, in the tunnel, when there was no longer any cause for fear, I was afraid and nearly dashed my brains out against the low ceiling; but I did not pause or even slacken speed before I saw the opening before me, made visible by the blessed sheen of moonlight. Then, indeed, I halted; and considering myself safe wiped my sword as well as I might with the ragged edge of my cloak, and sheathed her.
That done, I slung her over my shoulder and swung myself out and down, feeling with the toes of my sodden boots for the ledges that had supported me in the ascent. I had just gained the third when two quarrels struck the rock near my head. One must have wedged its point in some flaw in the ancient work, for it remained in place, blazing with white fire. I recall how astonished I was, and also how I hoped, in the few moments before the next struck nearer still and nearly blinded me, that the arbalests were not of the kind that bring a new projectile to the string when cocked, and thus are so swift to shoot again. When the third exploded against the stone, I knew they were, and dropped before the marksmen who had missed could fire yet again.
There was, as I ought to have known there would be, a deep pool where the stream fell from the mouth of the mine. I got another ducking, but since I was already wet it did no harm, and in fact quenched the flecks of fire that had clung to my face and arms.
There could be no question here of cannily remaining below the surface. The water seized me as if I were a stick and flung me to the top where it willed. This, by the greatest good luck, was some distance from the rock-face, and I was able to watch my attackers from behind as I clambered onto the bank. They and the woman who stood between them were staring at the place where the cascade fell.
As I drew Terminus Est for the final time that night, I called, “Over here, Agia.”
I had guessed earlier that it was she, but as she turned (more swiftly than either of the men with her) I glimpsed her face in the moonlight. It was a terrible face to me (though for all her self-depreciation so lovely) because the sight of it meant that Thecla was surely dead.
The man nearest me was fool enough to try to bring his arbalest to his shoulder before he pulled the trigger. I ducked and cut his legs from under him, while the other’s quarrel whizzed over my head like a meteor.
By the time I had straightened up again, the second man had dropped his arbalest and was drawing his hanger. Agia was quicker, making a cut at my neck with an athame before his weapon was free of the scabbard. I dodged her first stroke and parried her second, though Terminus Est’s blade was not made for fencing. My own attack made her bound back.
“Get behind him,” she called to the second arbalestier. “I can front him.”
He did not answer. Instead, his mouth swung open and his point swung wide.
Before I realized that it was not at me that he was looking, something feverishly gleaming bounded past me. I heard the ugly sound of a breaking skull.
Agia turned as gracefully as any cat and would have spitted the man-ape, but I struck the poisoned blade from her hand and sent it skittering into the pool.
She tried to flee then; I caught her by the hair and jerked her off her feet.
The man-ape was mumbling over the body of the arbalestier he had killed — whether he sought to loot it or was merely curious about its appearance I have never known. I set my foot on Agia’s neck, and the man-ape straightened and turned to face me, then dropped in the crouching posture I had seen in the mine and held up his arms. One hand was gone; I recognized the clean cut of Terminus Est. The man-ape mumbled something I could not understand.
I tried to reply. “Yes, I did that. I am sorry. We are at peace now.”
The beseeching look remained, and he spoke again. Blood still seeped from the stump, though his kind must possess a mechanism for pinching shut the veins, as thylacodons are said to do; without the attentions of a surgeon, a man would have bled to death from that wound.
“I cut it,” I said. “But it was while we were still fighting, before you people saw the Claw of the Conciliator.” Then it came to me that he must have followed me outside for another glimpse of the gem, braving the fear engendered by whatever we had waked below the hill. I thrust my hand into the top of my boot and pulled out the Claw, and the instant I had done so realized what a fool I had been to put the boot and its precious cargo so close to Agia’s reach, for her eyes went wide with cupidity at the moment that the man-ape abased himself further and stretched forth his piteous stump.
For a moment we were posed, all three, and a strange group we must have looked in that eerie light. An astonished voice — Jonas’s — called “Severian!” from the heights above. Like the trumpet note in a shadow play that dissolves all feigning, that shout ended our tableau. I lowered the Claw and concealed it in my palm. The man-ape bolted for the rock face, and Agia began to struggle and curse beneath my foot.
A rap with the flat of my blade quieted her, but I kept my boot on her until Jonas had joined me and there were two of us to prevent her escape.
“I thought you might need help,” he said. “I perceive I was mistaken.” He was looking at the corpses of the men who had been with Agia.
I said, “This wasn’t the real fight.”
Agia was sitting up, rubbing her neck and shoulders. “There were four, and we would have had you, but the bodies of those things, those firefly tiger-men, started pitching out of the hole, and two were afraid and slipped away.”
Jonas scratched his head with his steel hand, a sound like the currying of a charger. “I saw what I thought I saw, then. I had begun to wonder.”
I asked what he thought he had seen.
“A glowing being in a fur robe making an obeisance to you. You were holding up a cup of burning brandy, I th
ink. Or was it incense? What’s this?” He bent and picked up something from the edge of the bank, where the man-ape had crouched.
“A bludgeon.”
“Yes, I see that.” There was a loop of sinew at the end of the bone handle, and Jonas slipped it over his wrist. “Who are these people who tried to kill you?”
“We would have,” Agia said, “if it hadn’t been for that cloak. We saw him coming out of the hole, but it covered him when he started to climb down, and my men couldn’t see the target, only the skin of his arms.”
I explained as briefly as I could how I had become involved with Agia and her twin, and described the death of Agilus.
“So now she’s come to join him.” Jonas looked from her to the crimson length of Terminus Est and gave a little shrug. “I left my merychip up there, and perhaps I ought to go and look after her. That way I can say afterward that I saw nothing. Was this woman the one who sent the letter?”
“I should have known. I had told her about Thecla. You don’t know about Thecla, but she did, and that was what the letter was about. I told her while we were going through the Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There were mistakes in the letter and things Thecla would never have said, but I didn’t stop to think of them when I read it.”
I stepped away and replaced the Claw in my boot, thrusting it deep. “Maybe you had better attend to your animal, as you say. My own seems to have broken loose, and we may have to take turns riding yours.”
Jonas nodded and began to climb back the way he had come. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” I asked Agia. “I heard something, and the destrier cocked his ears at the sound. That was you. Why didn’t you kill me then?”
“We were up there.” She gestured toward the heights. “And I wanted the men I’d hired to shoot you when you came wading up the brook. They were stupid and stubborn as men always are, and said they wouldn’t waste their quarrels — that the creatures inside would kill you. I rolled down a stone, the biggest I could move, but by then it was too late.”
“They had told you about the mine?”
Agia shrugged, and the moonlight turned her bare shoulders to something more precious and more beautiful than flesh. “You’re going to kill me now, so what does it matter? All the local people tell stories about this place. They say those things come out at night during storms and take animals from the cowsheds, and sometimes break into the houses for children. There’s also a legend that they guard treasure inside, so I put that in the letter too. I thought if you wouldn’t come for your Thecla, you might for that. Can I stand with my back to you, Severian? If it’s all the same, I don’t want to see it coming.”
When she said that, I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my heart: I had not been certain I could strike her if I had to look into her face. I raised my own iron phallus, and as I did so felt there was one more thing I wanted to ask Agia; but I could not recall what it might be.
“Strike,” she said. “I am ready.”
I sought good footing, and my fingers found the woman’s head at one end of the guard, the head that marked the female edge. And a little later, again, “Strike!” But by that time I had climbed out of the vale.
Chapter 8
THE CULTELLARII
We returned to the inn in silence, and so slowly that the eastern sky was gray before we reached the town. Jonas was unsaddling the merychip when I said, “I didn’t kill her.”
He nodded without looking at me. “I know.”
“Did you watch? You said you wouldn’t.”
“I heard her voice when you were practically standing beside me. Will she try again?”
I waited, thinking, while he carried the little saddle into the tack room. When he came out, I said, “Yes, I’m sure she will. I didn’t exact a promise from her, if that’s what you mean. She wouldn’t have kept one in any case.”
“I would have killed her then.”
“Yes,” I said. “That would have been the right thing to do.”
We walked out of the stable together. There was light enough in the inn yard now for us to see the well, and the wide doors that led into the inn.
“I don’t think it would have been right — I’m only saying that I would have done it. I would have imagined myself stabbed in my sleep, dying on a dirty bed somewhere, and I would have swung that thing. It wouldn’t have been right.”
Jonas lifted the mace the man-ape had left behind, and chopped with it in a parody, brutal and graceless, of a sword cut. The head caught the light and both of us gasped.
It was of pounded gold.
Neither of us felt any desire to join the festivities the fair still proffered to those who had caroused all night. We retired to the room we shared, and prepared for sleep. When Jonas offered to share his gold with me, I refused. Earlier, I had had money in plenty and the advance on my fee, and he had been living, as it were, upon my largess. Now I was happy that he would no longer feel himself in my debt. I was ashamed, too, when I saw how completely he trusted me with his gold, and remembered how carefully I had concealed (in fact, still concealed) the existence of the Claw from him. I felt bound to tell him of it; but I did not, and contrived instead to slip my foot from my wet boot in such a way that the Claw fell into the toe.
I woke about noon, and after satisfying myself that the Claw was still there, roused Jonas as he had asked me. “There should be jewelers at the fair who’ll give me some sort of price for this,” he said. “At least, I can bargain with them. Want to come with me?”
“We should have something to eat, and by the time we’re through, I’ll be due at the scaffold.”
“Back to work then.”
“Yes.” I had picked up my cloak. It was sadly torn, and my boots were dull and still slightly damp.
“One of the maids here can sew that for you. It won’t be as good as new, but it will be a lot better than it is now.” Jonas swung open the door. “Come along, if you’re hungry. What are you looking so thoughtful about?”
In the inn’s parlor, with a good meal between us, and the innkeeper’s wife exercising her needle on my cloak in another room, I told him what had happened under the hill, ending with the steps I had heard far below ground.
“You’re a strange man,” was all he said.
“You are stranger than I. You don’t want people to know it, but you’re a foreigner of some kind.”
He smiled. “A cacogen?”
“An outlander.”
Jonas shook his head, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose I am. But you — you have this talisman that lets you command nightmares, and you have discovered a hoard of silver. Yet you talk about it to me as someone else might talk about the weather.”
I took a bit of bread. “It is strange, I agree. But the strangeness resides in the Claw, the thing itself, and not in me. As for talking about it to you, why shouldn’t I? If I were to steal your gold, I could sell it and spend the money, but I don’t think things would go well for someone who stole the Claw. I don’t know why I think that, but I do, and of course Agia stole it. As for the silver—”
“And she put it in your pocket?”
“In the sabretache that hangs from my belt. She thought her brother would kill me, remember. Then they were going to claim my body — they had planned that already, so they’d get Terminus Est and my habit. She would have had my sword and clothes and the gem too, and meanwhile, if it were found, I would be blamed and not she. I remember…”
“What?”
“The Pelerines. They stopped us as we were trying to get out. Jonas, do you think it’s true that some people can read the thoughts of others?”
“Of course.”
“Not everyone is so sure. Master Gurloes used to speak favorably of the idea, but Master Palaemon wouldn’t hear of it. Still, I think the chief priestess of the Pelerines could, at least to some degree. She knew Agia had taken something, and that I had not. She made Agia strip so they could search her, but they didn’t search me. Later they destroye
d their cathedral, and I think that must have been because of the loss of the Claw — it was the Cathedral of the Claw, after all.”
Jonas nodded thoughtfully.
“But none of this is what I wanted to ask you about. I’d like your opinion of the footsteps. Everyone knows about Erebus and Abaia and the other beings in the sea who will come to land someday. Nevertheless, I think you know more about them than most of the rest of us.”
Jonas’s face, which had been so open before, was closed and guarded now. “And why do you think that?”
“Because you’ve been a sailor, and because of the story about the beans — the story you told at the gate. You must have seen my brown book when I was reading it upstairs. It tells all the secrets of the world, or at least what various mages have said they were. I haven’t read it all or even half of it, though Thecla and I used to read an entry every few days and spend the time between readings arguing about it. But I’ve noticed that all the explanations in that book are simple, and seemingly childish.”
“Like my story.”
I nodded. “Your story might have come out of the book. When I first carried it to Thecla, I supposed it was intended for children, or for adults who enjoyed childish things. But when we had talked about some of the thoughts in it, I understood that they had to be expressed in that way or they couldn’t be expressed at all. If the writer had wanted to describe a new way to make wine or the best way to make love, he could have used complex and accurate language. But in the book he really wrote he had to say, ‘In the beginning was only the hexaemeron,’ or ‘It is not to see the icon standing still, but to see the still standing.’ The thing I heard underground… was that one of them?”
“I didn’t see it.” Jonas rose. “I’m going out now to sell the mace, but before I go I’m going to tell you what all housewives sooner or later tell their husbands: ‘Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.’ ”