by Gene Wolfe
“It is not so easily done as that. You must come with me, trusting, though it is only a moment. Come.”
She extended her hand toward me, and at the same moment I heard Dorcas’s agonized voice crying for help.
I turned to run to her. Yet if the undine had waited, I think I might have turned back. She did not. The river itself seemed to heave from its bed with a roar like breaking surf. It was as though a lake had been flung at my head, and it struck me like a stone and tumbled me in its wash like a stick. A moment later, when it receded, I found myself far up the bank, soaked and bruised and swordless. Fifty paces away the undine’s white body rose half out of the river. Without the support of the water her flesh sagged on bones that seemed ready to snap under its weight, and her hair hung lank to the soaking sand. Even as I watched, water mingled with blood ran from her nostrils.
I fled, and by the time I reached Dorcas at our fire, the undine was gone save for a swirl of silt that darkened the river below the sandbar.
Dorcas’s face was nearly as white. “What was that?” she whispered. “Where were you?”
“You saw her then. I was afraid…”
“How horrible.” Dorcas had thrown herself into my arms, pressing her body to mine. “Horrible.”
“That wasn’t why you called, though, was it? You couldn’t have seen her from here until she rose out of the pool.”
Dorcas pointed mutely toward the farther side of the fire, and I saw the ground was soaked with blood where Jolenta lay.
There were two narrow cuts in her left wrist, each about the length of my thumb; and though I touched them with the Claw, it seemed the blood that welled from them would not clot. When we had soaked several bandages torn from Dorcas’s scant store of clothing, I boiled thread and needle in a little pan she had and sewed the edges of the wounds shut. Through all this Jolenta seemed less than half conscious; from time to time her eyes opened, but they closed again almost immediately, and there was no recognition in them. She spoke only once, saying, “Now you see that he, whom you have esteemed your divinity, would countenance and advise all I have proposed to you. Before the New Sun rises, let us make a new beginning.” At the time, I did not recognize it as one of her lines. When her wound no longer bled, and we had shifted her to clean ground and washed her, I went back to the place where I had found myself when the water receded, and after some searching discovered Terminus Est with only her pommel and two fingers’ width of hilt protruding from the wet sand.
I cleaned and oiled the blade, and Dorcas and I discussed what we should do. I told her of my dream, the night before I met Baldanders and Dr. Talos, and then about hearing the undine’s voice while she and Jolenta slept, and what she had said.
“Is she still there, do you think? You were down there when you found your sword. Could you have seen her through the water if she were near the bottom?”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe she is. She injured herself in some way when she tried to leave the river to stop me, and from the pallor of her skin, I doubt she would stay long in any water shallower than Gyoll’s under the sun of a clear day. But no, if she had been there I don’t think I would have seen her — the water was too roiled.”
Dorcas, who had never looked more charming than at this moment, sitting on the ground with her chin propped on one knee, was silent for a time, and seemed to watch the eastern clouds, dyed cerise and flame by the eternal mysterious hope of dawn. At length she said, “She must have wanted you very badly.”
“To have come up out of the water like that? I think she must have been on land before she had become so large, and she forgot for a moment at least that she could no longer do it.”
“But before that she swam up filthy Gyoll, and then up this narrow little river. She must have been hoping to seize you when we crossed, but she found she could not get above the sandbar, and so she called you down. Altogether, it can’t have been a pleasant trip for someone accustomed to swimming between the stars.”
“You believe her, then?”
“When I was with Dr. Talos and you were gone, he and Jolenta used to tell me what a simple-minded person I was for believing people we met on the road, and things that Baldanders said, and things they said themselves, too. Just the same, I think that even the people who are called liars tell the truth much more often than they lie. It’s so much easier! If that story about saving you wasn’t true, why tell it? It could only frighten you when you thought back on it. And if she doesn’t swim between stars what a useless thing to say. Something’s bothering you, though. I can see it. What is it?”
I did not want to describe my meeting with the Autarch in detail, so I said, “Not long ago I saw a picture — in a book — of a being who lives in the gulf. She was winged. Not like birds’ wings, but enormous continuous planes of thin, pigmented material. Wings that could beat against the starlight.”
Dorcas looked interested. “Is it in your brown book?”
“No, another book. I don’t have it here.”
“Just the same, it reminds me that we were going to see what your brown book has to say about the Conciliator. Do you still have it?”
I did, and I drew it out. It was damp from my wetting, so I opened it and laid it where the sun would strike its leaves, and the breezes that had sprung up as Urth’s face looked on his again would play over them. After that, the pages turned gently as we talked, so that pictures of men and women and monsters took my eye between our words, and thus engraved themselves on my mind, so that they are there yet. Occasionally too, phrases, and even short passages, glowed and faded as the light caught, then released, the sheen of the metallic ink: “soulless warrior!” “lucid yellow,” “by noyade.” Later: “These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient.” And: “Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be.”
“You don’t want to read it now?” Dorcas asked.
“No. I want to hear what happened to Jolenta.”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping and dreaming of… the kind of thing I always do. And I went into a toy shop. There were shelves along the wall with dolls on them, and a well in the center of the floor with dolls sitting on the coping. I remember thinking that my baby was too young for dolls, but they were so pretty, and I had not had one since I was a little girl, so I would buy one and keep it for the baby, and meanwhile I could take it out sometimes and look at it, and perhaps make it stand before the mirror in my room. I pointed to the most beautiful one, which was one of those on the coping, and when the shopman picked it up for me I saw it was Jolenta, and it slipped from his hands. I saw it falling down very far, toward the black water. Then I woke up. Naturally I looked to see if she was all right…”
“And you found her bleeding?”
Dorcas nodded, her pale golden hair glinting in the light. “So I called for you — twice — and then I saw you down by the sandbar, and that thing came out of the water after you.”
“There’s no reason for you to look so pale,” I told her. “Jolenta was bitten by an animal, that’s clear. I’ve no idea of what kind, but judging from the bite it was a fairly small one, and no more to be feared than any other little animal with sharp teeth and a bad disposition.”
“Severian, I remember being told that there were blood bats farther north. When I was just a child, someone used to frighten me by telling me about them. And then when I was older, once a common bat got into the house. Somebody killed it, and I asked my father if it were a blood bat, and if there were really any such things. He said there were, but they lived in the north, in the steaming forests at the center of the world. They bit sleeping people and grazing animals by night, and their spittle was poisoned so that the wounds of their teeth bled on.”
Dorcas paused, looking up into the trees. “My father said that the city had been creeping northward along the river for all of history, having begun as an autochthon village where Gyoll joins the sea, and how terrible it would b
e when it entered the region where the blood bats fly and they could roost in the derelict buildings. It must be terrible already for the people of the House Absolute. We cannot have walked so very far from there.”
“The Autarch has my sympathy,” I said. “But I don’t think I have ever heard you talk so much about your past life before. Do you remember your father now, and the house where the bat was killed?”
She stood; though she tried to look brave, I could see that she was trembling. “I remember more each morning, after my dreams. But, Severian, we must go now. Jolenta will be weak. She must have food, and clean water to drink. We can’t stay here.”
I was ravenously hungry myself. I put the brown book back into my sabretache and sheathed Terminus Est’s freshly oiled blade. Dorcas packed her little bundle of belongings.
Then we set out, fording the river well above the sandbar. Jolenta was unable to walk alone; we had to support her on either side. Her face was drawn, and though she had regained consciousness when we lifted her, she seldom spoke. When she did it was only a word or two. For the first time, I noticed how thin her lips were, and now the lower lip had lost its firmness and hung away from her teeth, showing the livid gums. It seemed to me that her entire body, yesterday so opulent, had softened like wax, so that instead of appearing (as she once had) a woman to Dorcas’s child, she seemed a flower too long blown, the very end of summer to Dorcas’s spring.
As we walked thus along a narrow, dusty track with sugarcane already higher than my head to either side, I found myself thinking over and over of how I had desired her in the short time I had known her. Memory, so perfect and vivid as to be more compelling than any opiate, showed me the woman as I had believed I had seen her first, when Dorcas and I had come around a grove of trees by night to find Dr. Talos’s stage gleaming with lights in a pasture. How strange it had seemed to see her by daylight as perfect as she had appeared in the flattering glow of the flambeaux the night before, when we set off northward on the most glorious morning I can remember.
Love and desire are said to be no more than cousins, and I had found it so until I walked with Jolenta’s flaccid arm about my neck. But it is not really true. Rather, the love of women was the dark side of a feminine ideal I had nourished for myself on dreams of Valeria and Thecla and Agia, of Dorcas and Jolenta and Vodalus’s leman of the heart-shaped face and cooing voice, the woman I now knew to be Thecla’s half-sister Thea. So that as we trudged between the walls of cane, when desire had fled and I could only look at Jolenta with pity, I found that though I had believed I cared only for her importunate, rose-flushed flesh and the awkward grace of her movements, I loved her.
Chapter 29
THE HERDSMEN
For most of the morning we walked through the cane, meeting no one. Jolenta grew neither stronger nor weaker, so far as I could judge; but it seemed to me that hunger, and the fatigue of supporting her, and the pitiless glare of the sun were telling upon me, for twice or thrice, when I glimpsed her from the corner of an eye, if seemed that I was not seeing Jolenta at all, but someone else, a woman I recalled but could not identify. If I turned my head to look at her, this impression (which was always very slight) vanished altogether.
So we walked, talking little. It was the only time since I had received her from Master Palaemon that Terminus Est seemed burdensome to me. My shoulder grew raw under the baldric.
I cut cane for us, and we chewed it for the sweet juice. Jolenta was always thirsty, and since she could not walk unless we aided her, and could not hold her stalk of cane when we did, we were forced to stop often. It was strange to see those long legs, so beautifully molded, with their slender ankles and ripe thighs, so useless.
In a day we reached the end of the cane and emerged onto the edge of the true pampa, the sea of grass. Here there were still a few trees, though they were so widely scattered that each was in sight of no more than two or three others. To each of these trees the body of some beast of prey was lashed with rawhide, its forepaws outspread like arms. They were mostly the spotted tigers common in that part of the country; but I saw atroxes too, with hair like man’s, and sword-toothed smilodons. Most were hardly more than bones, but some lived and made those sounds that, as the people believe, serve to frighten other tigers, atroxes, and smilodons which, if they were not so frightened, would prey upon the cattle.
These cattle represented a far greater danger to us than the cats did. The herd bulls will charge anything that comes near them, and we were forced to give each herd we came across as much room as would prevent their short-sighted eyes from seeing us, and to move downwind of each. On these occasions, I was forced to let Dorcas prop Jolenta’s weight as best she could, so I could walk ahead of them and somewhat nearer the animals. Once I had to leap aside and strike off the head of a bull as it charged. We built a fire of dry grass and roasted some of the meat.
The next time I recalled the Claw, and the way in which it had ended the attack of the man-apes. I drew it out, and the fierce black bull trotted to me and nuzzled my hand. We put Jolenta on his back with Dorcas to hold her on, and I walked beside his head, holding the gem where he could see its blue light. A living smilodon was bound to the next tree we reached, which was nearly the last we saw, and I was afraid he would frighten the bull. Yet when we passed him I seemed to feel his eyes upon my back, yellow eyes as large as pigeon’s eggs. My own tongue was swollen with his thirst. I gave Dorcas the gem to hold and went back and cut him down, thinking all the while that he would surely attack me. He fell to the ground too weak to stand, and I, who had no water to give him, could only walk away.
A little after noon, I noticed a carrion bird circling high above us. It is said they smell death, and I remembered that once or twice when the journeymen were very busy in the examination room, it was necessary for us apprentices to turn out to throw stones at those who settled on the ruined curtain wall, lest they give the Citadel a reputation more evil than it already possessed. The thought that Jolenta might die was repugnant to me, and I would have given much for a bow, so that I might perhaps pick the bird out of the air; but I had nothing of the kind, and could only wish.
After an interminable time, this first bird was joined by two much smaller ones, and from their bright head color, occasionally visible even from so far below, I knew them to be Cathartidae. Thus the first, whose wings had three times the spread of theirs, was a mountain teratornis, the breed that is said to attack climbers, raking their faces with poisoned talons and striking them with the elbows of its great pinions until they fall to their deaths. From time to time the other two approached it too closely, and it turned upon them. When that occurred we sometimes heard a shrill cry come drifting down from the ramparts of their castle of air. Once, in a macabre mood, I gestured for the birds to join us. All three dove, and I brandished my sword at them and gestured no more. When the western horizon had climbed nearly to the sun, we reached a low house, scarcely more than a hut, built of turf. A wiry man in leather leggings sat on a bench before it, drinking maté and pretending to watch the colors in the clouds. In truth, he must have seen us long before we saw him, for he was small and brown and blended well with his small, brown home, while we had been silhouetted against the sky.
I thrust away the Claw when I saw this herdsman, though I was not certain what the bull would do when it was no longer in his sight. In the event he did nothing, plodding ahead with the two women on his back as before. When we reached the sod house I lifted them down, and he raised his muzzle and sniffed the wind, then looked at me from one eye. I waved toward the undulating grass, both to show him I had no more need of him and to let him see that my hand was empty. He wheeled and trotted away.
The herdsman took his pewter straw from between his lips. “That was an ox,” he said.
I nodded. “We needed him to carry this poor woman, who is ill, and so we borrowed him. Is he yours? We hoped you wouldn’t mind, and after all, we did him no harm.”
“No, no.” The herdsman mad
e a vaguely deprecating gesture. “I only asked because when I first saw you I thought he was a trier. My eyes are not as good as they once were.” He told us how good they once were, which was very good indeed. “But as you say, it was an ox.”
This time Dorcas and I nodded together.
“You see what it is to become old. I would have licked the blade of this knife,” he slapped the metal hilt that protruded above his broad belt, “and pointed it to the sun to swear that I saw something between the ox’s legs. But if I were not such a fool I would know that no one can ride the bulls of the pampas. The red panther does it, but then he holds on with his claws, and sometimes he dies even so. No doubt it was an udder the ox inherited from his mother. I knew her, and she had one.”
I said I was a city man, and very ignorant of everything that concerned cattle.
“Ah,” he said, and sucked his maté. “I am a man more ignorant than you. Everyone around here but me is one ignorant eclectic. You know these people they call eclectics? They don’t know anything — how can a man learn with neighbors like that?”
Dorcas said, “Please, won’t you let us take this woman inside where she can lie down? I am afraid she’s dying.”
“I told you I don’t know nothing. You should ask this man here — he can lead an ox — I almost said a bull — like a dog.”
“But he can’t help her! Only you can.”
The herdsman cocked an eye at me, and I understood that he had established to his own satisfaction that it was I, and not Dorcas, who had tamed the bull. “I’m very sorry for your friend,” he said, “who I can see must have been a lovely woman once. But even though I’ve been sitting here cracking jokes with you, I have a friend of my own, and right now he’s lying inside. You’re afraid your friend is dying. I know mine is, and I’d like to let him go with no one to bother him.”