by Gene Wolfe
“A danger of death?” I asked. “But you tell me there is none — so if I believe you, why should I fear? And if I cannot believe you, why should I believe you now?” Nevertheless, I rose to go.
The Cumaean looked up. “She’s right,” she croaked. “Though she does not know it, and only speaks by rote like a starling in a cage. Death is nothing, and for that reason you must fear it. What is more to be feared?”
I laughed again. “I can’t argue with someone as wise as you. And because you gave us what help you could, we will go now because you wish it.”
The Cumaean permitted me to take Jolenta from her, but said, “I do not wish it. My acolyte still believes the universe hers to command, a board where she can move counters to form whatever patterns suit her. The Magi see fit to number me among themselves when they write their short roll, and I should lose my place on it if I did not know that people like ourselves are only little fish, who must swim with unseen tides if we are not to exhaust ourselves without finding sustenance. Now you must wrap this poor creature in your cloak and lay her by my fire. When this place passes out of the shadow of Urth, I will look to her wound again.”
I remained standing, holding Jolenta, uncertain whether we should go or stay. The Cumaean’s intentions seemed friendly enough, but her metaphor had carried an unpleasant reminder of the undine; and as I studied her face I had come to doubt that she was an old woman at all, and to recall only too clearly the hideous faces of the cacogens who had removed their masks when Baldanders had rushed among them.
“You shame me, Mother,” Merryn said. “Shall I call to him?”
“He has heard us. He will come without your call.”
She was right. I already detected the scrape of boots on the tiles of the other side of the roof.
“You are alarmed. Would it not be better to put down the woman as I instructed you, so you might take up your sword to defend your paramour? But there will be no need.”
By the time she had finished speaking, I could see a tall hat and a big head and broad shoulders silhouetted against the night sky. I laid Jolenta near Dorcas and drew Terminus Est.
“No need of that,” a deep voice said. “No need at all, young fellow. I’d have come out sooner to renew our acquaintance, but I didn’t know the Chatelaine here wanted it. My master — and yours — sends his greetings.” It was Hildegrin.
Chapter 31
THE CLEANSING
“You may tell your master I delivered his message,” I said.
Hildegrin smiled. “And have you a message to return, armiger? Remember, I’m from the quercine penetralia.”
“No,” I said. “None.”
Dorcas looked up. “I do. A person I met in the gardens of the House Absolute told me I would encounter someone who identified himself thus, and that I was to say to him, ‘When the leaves are grown, the wood is to march north.’ ”
Hildegrin laid a finger beside his nose. “All the wood? Is that what he said?”
“He gave me the words I have already recited to you, and nothing more.”
“Dorcas,” I asked, “why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I’ve hardly had an opportunity to talk to you alone since we met at the crossing of the paths. And besides, I could see it was a dangerous thing to know. I couldn’t see any reason to put that danger on you. It was the man who gave Dr. Talos all that money who told me. But he didn’t give Dr. Talos the message — I know because I listened when they talked. He only said that he was your friend, and told me.”
“And told you to tell me.”
Dorcas shook her head.
Hildegrin’s thick-throated, chuckle might almost have come from underground. “Well, it don’t hardly matter now, does it? It’s been delivered, and for myself I don’t mind tellin’ you I wouldn’t have minded if it had waited a little longer. But we’re all friends here, except maybe for the sick girl, and I don’t think she can hear what’s said, or understand what we’re talkin’ about if she could. What did you say her name was? I couldn’t hear you too clear when I was over there on the other side.”
“That was because I didn’t say it at all,” I told him. “But her name is Jolenta.” As I pronounced Jolenta, I looked at her and seeing her in the firelight realized she was Jolenta no longer — nothing of the beautiful woman Jonas had loved remained in that haggard face.
“And a bat bite did it? They’ve grown uncommon strong lately then. I’ve been bit a couple of times myself.” I looked at Hildegrin sharply, and he added, “Oh yes, I’ve seen her before, young sieur, as well as yourself and little Dorcas. You didn’t think I let you and that other gal leave, the Botanic Gardens alone, did you? Not with you talkin’ of goin’ north and fightin’ a officer of the Septentrions. I saw you fight and saw you take that fellow’s head off — I helped to catch him, by the bye, because I thought he might be from the House Absolute for true — and I was in the back of the people that watched you on the stage that night. I didn’t lose you till the affair at the gate the next day. I seen you and I seen her, though there’s not much left of her now except the hair, and I think even that’s changed.”
Merryn asked the Cumaean, “Shall I tell them, Mother?”
The old woman nodded. “If you can, child.”
“She has been imbued with a glamour that rendered her beautiful. It is fading fast now because of the blood she lost and because she has had a great deal of exercise. By morning only traces will remain.”
Dorcas drew back, “Magic, you mean?”
“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”
Hildegrin was staring at Jolenta with a thoughtful expression.
“I didn’t know looks could be changed so much. That might be useful, that might. Can your mistress do it?”
“She could do much more than this, if she willed it.”
Dorcas whispered, “But how was this done?”
“There have been substances drawn from the glands of beasts added to her blood, to change the pattern in which her flesh was deposited. Those gave her a slender waist, breasts like melons, and so on. They may have been used to add calf to her legs as well. Cleaning and the application of healthening broths to the skin freshened her face. Her teeth were cleaned too, and some were ground down and given false crowns — one has fallen away now, if you’ll look. Her hair was dyed, and thickened by sewing threads of colored silk into her scalp. No doubt much body hair was killed as well, and that at least will remain so. Most important, she was promised beauty while entranced. Such promises are believed with faith greater than any child’s, and her belief compelled yours.”
“Can nothing be done for her?” Dorcas asked.
“Not by me, and it is not a task of the kind the Cumaean undertakes, save in great need.”
“But she will live?”
“As the Mother told you — though she will not wish it.”
Hildegrin cleared his throat and spat over the side of the roof. “That’s settled then. We’ve done what we can for her, and it’s all we can do. So what I say is let’s get on with what we come for. Like you said, Cumaean, it’s good these others showed up. I got the message I was supposed to, and they’re friends of the Liege of Leaves, just like me. The armiger here can help me fetch up this Apu-Punchau, and what with my two fellows bein’ killed on the road, I’ll be glad to have him. So what’s to keep us from goin’ ahead?”
“Nothing,” the Cumaean murmured. “The star is in the ascendant.”
Dorcas said, “If we’re going to assist you with something, shouldn’t we know what it is?”
“Bringin’ back the past,” Hildegrin told her grandly. “Divin’ back into the time of old Urth’s greatness. There was somebody who used to live in this here place we’re sittin’ on that knew things that could make a difference. I intend to have him up. It’ll be the high point, if I may say it, of a career that’s already considered pretty spectacular in knowin’ circles.”
I asked, “You’re going
to open the tomb? Surely, even with alzabo—”
The Cumaean reached out to smooth Jolenta’s forehead. “We may call it a tomb, but it was not his. His house, rather.”
“You see what with me workin’ so near,” Hildegrin explained, “I’ve been in the way to do this Chatelaine a favor now and again. More than one, if I may say it, and more than two. Finally I figured the time had come for me to collect. I mentioned my little plan to the Master of the Wood, you may be sure. And here we are.”
I said, “I had been given to understand that the Cumaean served Father Inire.”
“She pays her debts,” Hildegrin announced smugly. “Quality always does. And you don’t have to be a wise woman to know it might be wise to have a few friends on the other side, just in case that’s the side that wins.”
Dorcas asked the Cumaean, “Who was this Apu-Punchau and why is his palace still standing when the rest of the town is only tumbled stones?”
When the old woman did not reply, Merryn said, “Less than a legend, for not even scholars now remember his story. The Mother has told us that his name means the Head of Day. In the earliest eons he appeared among the people here and taught them many wonderful secrets. Often he vanished, but always he returned. At last he did not return, and invaders laid waste to his cities. Now he shall return for the last time.”
“Indeed. Without magic?”
The Cumaean looked up at Dorcas with eyes that seemed as bright as the stars. “Words are symbols. Merryn chooses to delimit magic as that which does not exist… and so it does not exist. If you choose to call what we are about to do here magic then magic lives while we do it. In ancient days, in a land far off, there stood two empires, divided by mountains. One dressed its soldiers in yellow, the other in green. For a hundred generations they struggled. I see that the man with you knows the tale.”
“And after a hundred generations,” I said, “an eremite came among them and counseled the emperor of the yellow army to dress his men in green, and the master of the green army that he should clothe it in yellow. But the battle continued as before. In my sabretache, I have a book called The Wonders of Urth and Sky, and the story is told there.”
“That is the wisest of all the books of men,” the Cumaean said. “Though there are few who can gain any benefit from reading it. Child, explain to this man, who will be a sage in time, what we do tonight.”
The young witch nodded. “All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us? In sleep the mind is encircled by its time, which is why we so often hear the voices of the dead there, and receive intelligence of things to come. Those who, like the Mother, have learned to enter the same state while waking live surrounded by their own lives, even as the Abraxas perceives all of time as an eternal instant.”
There had been little wind that night, but I noticed now that such wind as there had been had died utterly. A stillness hung in the air, so that despite the softness of Dorcas’s voice her words seemed to ring. “Is that what this woman you call the Cumaean will do, then? Enter that state, and speaking with the voice of the dead tell this man whatever it is he wishes to know?”
“She cannot. She is very old, but this city was devastated whole ages before she came to be. Only her own time rings her, for that is all her mind comprehends by direct knowledge. To restore the city, we must make use of a mind that existed when it was whole.”
“And is there anyone in the world that old?”
The Cumaean shook her head. “In the world? No. Yet such a mind exists. Look where I point, child, just above the clouds. The red star there is called the Fish’s Mouth, and on its one surviving world there dwells an ancient and acute mind. Merryn, take my hand, and you, Badger, take the other. Torturer, take the right hand of your sick friend, and Hildegrin’s. Your paramour must take the sick woman’s other hand, and Merryn’s… Now we are linked, men to one side, women to the other.”
“And we’d best do somethin’ quick,” Hildegrin grumbled. “There’s a storm comin’, I would say.”
“We shall, as quickly as may be. Now I must use all minds, and the sick woman’s will be of little help. You will feel me guiding your thought. Do as I bid you.” Releasing Merryn’s hand for a moment, the old woman (if she were in truth a woman at all) reached into her bodice and drew out a rod whose tips vanished into the night as if they were at the borders of my field of vision, though it was hardly longer than a dagger. She opened her mouth; I thought she meant to hold the rod between her teeth, but she swallowed it. A moment later I could detect its glowing image, muted and tinged with crimson below the sagging skin of her throat.
“Close eyes, all of you… There is a woman here I do not know, a high woman chained… never mind, Torturer, I know her now. Do not shrink from my hand… None of you shrink from my hand…”
In the stupor that had followed Vodalus’s banquet, I had known what it was to share my mind with another. This was different. The Cumaean did not appear as I had seen her, or as a young version of herself, or (as it seemed to me) as anything. Rather, I found my thought surrounded by hers, as a fish in a bowl floats in a bubble of invisible water. Thecla was there with me, but I could not see her whole; it was as if she were standing behind me and I saw her hand over my shoulder at one moment, and felt her breath on my cheek at the next. Then she was gone and everything with her. I felt my thought hurled off into the night, lost among the ruins.
When I recovered, I was lying on the tiles near the fire. My mouth was wet with the foam of my spittle mixed with my own blood, for I had bitten my lips and tongue. My legs were too weak to stand, but I raised myself to a sitting posture again.
At first I thought the others were gone. The roof was solid under me, but they had become, to my sight, as vaporous as ghosts. A phantom Hildegrin sprawled on my right — I thrust my hand into his chest and felt his heart beat against it like a moth that struggled to escape. Jolenta was dimmest of all, hardly present. More had been done to her than Merryn had guessed; I saw wires and bands of metal beneath her flesh, though even they were dim. I looked to myself then, at my legs and feet, and found I could see the Claw burning like a blue flame through the leather of my boot. I grasped it, but there was no strength in my fingers; I could not take it forth.
Dorcas lay as if in sleep. There was no foam flecking her lips, and she was more solid in appearance than Hildegrin. Merryn had collapsed into a black-clad doll, so thin and dim that slender Dorcas seemed robust beside her. Now that intelligence no longer animated that ivory mask, I saw that it was no more than parchment over bone.
As I had suspected, the Cumaean was not a woman at all; yet neither was she one of the horrors I had beheld in the gardens of the House Absolute. Something sleekly reptilian coiled about the glowing rod. I looked for the head but found none, though each of the patternings on the reptile’s back was a face, and the eyes of each face seemed lost in rapture.
Dorcas woke while I looked from one to another. “What has happened to us?” she said. Hildegrin was stirring.
“I think we are seeing ourselves from a perspective longer than a single instant’s.”
Her mouth opened, but there was no cry.
Although the threatening clouds had brought no wind, dust was swirling through the streets below us. I do not know how to describe it except by saying that it seemed as if an uncountable host of minute insects a hundredth the size of midges had been concealed in the crevices of the rough pavement, and now were drawn by the moonlight to their nuptial flight. There was no sound, and no regularity in their motions, but after a time the undifferentiated mass formed swarms that swept to and fro, growing always larger and more dense, and at last sank again to the broken stones.
It seemed then that the insects no longer flew, but crawled over one another, each trying to reach the center of the swarm. “They are alive,” I said.
But Dor
cas whispered, “Look, they are dead.”
She was correct. The swarms that had seethed with life a moment before now showed bleached ribs; the dust motes, linking themselves just as scholars piece together shards of ancient glass to recreate for us a colored window shattered thousands of years before, formed skulls that gleamed green in the moonlight. Beast-aelurodons, lumbering spelaeae, and slinking shapes to which I could put no name, all fainter than we who watched from the rooftop — moved among the dead. One by one they rose, and the beasts vanished. Feebly at first, they began to rebuild their town; stones were lifted again, and timbers molded of ashes were laid into sockets in the restored walls. The people, who had seemed hardly more than ambulant corpses when they rose, gathered strength from their work and became a bandy-legged race who walked like sailors and rolled cyclopean stones with the might of their wide shoulders. Then the town was complete, and we waited to see what would happen next.
Drums broke the stillness of the night; by their tone I knew that when they had last beat a forest had stood about the town, for they reverberated as sounds only reverberate among the boles of great trees. A shaman with a shaven head paraded the street, naked and painted with pictographs in a script I had never seen, so expressive that the mere shapes of the words seemed to shout their meanings.
Dancers followed him, a hundred or more capering in lockstep, single-file, the hands of each on the head of the dancer before him. Their faces were upturned, making me wonder (as I wonder still) if they did not dance in imitation of the hundred-eyed serpent we called the Cumaean. Slowly they coiled and twined, up and down the street, around the shaman and back again until at last they reached the entrance to the house from which we watched them. With a crash like thunder, the stone slab of the door fell. There was an odor as of myrrh and roses.
A man came forth to greet the dancers. If he had possessed a hundred arms, or had worn his head beneath his hands, I could not have been more astonished, for his was a face I had known since childhood, the face of the funeral bronze in the mausoleum where I played as a boy. There were massive gold bracelets on his arms, bracelets set with jacinths and opals, carnelians and flashing emeralds. With measured strides he advanced until he stood in the center of the procession, with the dancers swaying about him. Then he turned toward us and lifted his arms. He was looking at us, and I knew that he, alone of all the hundreds there, truly saw us.