by Gene Wolfe
And it seemed to me that she became a trifle less sorrowful until I mentioned the fountain, whose waters had run from its cracked basin to form a little stream that some gardener had sent wandering among the trees to refresh them, and there to end by soaking the ground; but then a darkness that was nowhere in the room but on Dorcas’s face came to settle there like one of those strange things that had pursued Jonas and me through the cedars. Then she would no longer look at me, and after a time she truly slept.
I got up as silently as I could, unbolted the door, and went down the crooked stair. The hostess was still working in the common room below, but the patrons who had been there were gone. I explained to her that the woman I had brought was ill, paid the rent of the room for several days, and promising to return and take care of any other expenses, asked her to look in on her from time to time, and to feed her if she would eat.
“Ah, it will be a blessing to us to have someone sleeping in the room,” the hostess said. “But if your darling’s sick, is the Duck’s Nest the best place you can find for her? Can’t you take her home?”
“I’m afraid living in my house is what has made her ill. At least, I don’t want to risk the chance that returning there will make her worse.”
“Poor darling!” The hostess shook her head. “So pretty too, and doesn’t look more than a child. How old is she?”
I told her I did not know.
“Well, I’ll have a visit with her and give her some soup when she’s ready for it.” She looked at me as if to say that the time would come soon enough once I was away. “But I want you to know that I won’t hold her a prisoner for you. If she wants to leave, she’ll be free to go.”
When I stepped out of the little inn, I wished to return to the Vincula by the most direct route; but I made the mistake of supposing that since the narrow street on which the Duck’s Nest stood ran almost due south, it would be quicker to continue along it and cross the Acis lower down than to retrace the steps Dorcas and I had already taken and go back to the foot of the postern wall of Acies Castle.
The narrow street betrayed me, as I would have expected if I had been more familiar with the ways of Thrax. For all those crooked streets that snake along the slopes, though they may cross one another, on the whole run up and down; so that to reach one cliff-hugging house from another (unless they are quite close together or one above the other) it is necessary to walk down to the central strip near the river, and then back up again. Thus before long I found myself as high up the eastern cliff as the Vincula was on the western one, with less prospect of reaching it than I had when I left the inn.
To be truthful, it was not a wholly unpleasant discovery. I had work to do there, and no particular desire to do it, my mind being still full of thoughts of Dorcas. It felt better to wear out my frustrations by the use of my legs, and so I resolved to follow the capering street to the top if need be and see the Vincula and Acies Castle from that height, and then to show my badge of office to the guards at the fortifications there and walk along them to the Capulus and so cross the river by the lowest way.
But after half a watch of strenuous effort, I found I could go no farther. The street ended against a precipice three or four chains high, and perhaps had properly ended sooner, for the last few score paces I had walked had been on what was probably no more than a private path to the miserable jacal of mud and sticks before which I stood.
After making certain there was no way around it, and no way to the top for some distance from where I stood, I was about to turn away in disgust when a child slipped out of the jacal, and sidling toward me in a half bold, half fearful way, watching me with its right eye only, extended a small and very dirty hand in the universal gesture of beggars. Perhaps I would have laughed at the poor little creature, so timid and so importunate, if I had felt in a better mood; as it was, I dropped a few aes into the soiled palm.
Encouraged, the child ventured to say, “My sister is sick. Very sick, sieur.” From the timbre of its voice I decided it was a boy; and because he turned his head almost toward me when he spoke, I could see that his left eye was swollen shut by some infection. Tears of pus had run from it to dry on the cheek below. “Very, very sick.”
“I see,” I told him.
“Oh, no, sieur. You cannot, not from here. But if you wish you can look in through the door — you will not bother her.”
Just then a man wearing the scuffed leather apron of a mason called, “What is it, Jader? What does he want?” He was toiling up the path in our direction.
As anyone might have anticipated, the boy was only frightened into silence by the question. I said, “I was asking the best way to the lower city.”
The mason answered nothing, but stopped about four strides from me and folded arms that looked harder than the stones they broke. He seemed angry and distrustful, though I could not be sure why. Perhaps my accent had betrayed that I came from the south; perhaps it was only because of the way I was dressed, which though it was by no means rich or fantastic, indicated that I belonged to a social class higher than his own.
“Am I trespassing?” I asked. “Do you own this place?”
There was no reply. Whatever he felt about me, it was plain that in his opinion there could be no communication between us. When I spoke to him, it could only be as a man speaks to a beast, and not even to intelligent beasts at that, but only as a drover shouts at kine. And on his side, when I spoke it was only as beasts speak to a man, a sound made in the throat.
I have noticed that in books this sort of stalemate never seems to occur; the authors are so anxious to move their stories forward (however wooden they may be, advancing like market carts with squeaking wheels that are never still, though they go only to dusty villages where the charm of the country is lost and the pleasures of the city will never be found) that there are no such misunderstandings, no refusals to negotiate. The assassin who holds a dagger to his victim’s neck is eager to discuss the whole matter, and at any length the victim or the author may wish. The passionate pair in love’s embrace are at least equally willing to postpone the stabbing, if not more so.
In life it is not the same. I stared at the mason, and he at me. I felt I could have killed him, but I could not be sure of it, both because he looked unusually strong and because I could not be certain he did not have some concealed weapon, or friends in the miserable dwellings close by. I felt he was about to spit onto the path between us, and if he had I would have flung my jelab over his head and pinned him. But he did not, and when we had stared at each other for several moments, the boy, who perhaps had no idea of what was taking place said again, “You can look through the door, sieur. You won’t bother my sister.” He even dared to tug a little at my sleeve in his eagerness to show he had not lied, not seeming to realize that his own appearance justified any amount of begging.
“I believe you,” I said. But then I understood that to say I believed him was to insult him by showing that I did not have faith enough in what he said to put it to the test. I bent and peered, though at first I could see little, looking as I was from the bright sunshine into the shadowy interior of the jacal.
The light was almost squarely behind me. I felt its pressure on the nape of my neck, and I was conscious that the mason could attack me with impunity now that my back was toward him.
Tiny as it was, the room inside was not cluttered. Some straw had been heaped against the wall farthest from the door, and the girl lay upon it. She was in that state of disease in which we no longer feel pity for the sick person, who has instead become an object of horror. Her face was a death’s head over which was stretched skin as thin and translucent as the head of a drum. Her lips could no longer cover her teeth even in sleep, and under the scythe of fever, her hair had fallen away until only wisps remained.
I braced my hands on the mud and wattle wall beside the door and straightened up. The boy said, “You see she is very sick, sieur. My sister.” He held out his hand again.
I saw it
— I see it before me now — but it made no immediate impression on my mind. I could think only of the Claw; and it seemed to me that it was pressing against my breastbone, not so much like a weight as like the knuckles of an invisible fist. I remembered the uhlan who had appeared dead until I touched his lips with the Claw, and who now seemed to me to belong to the remote past; and I remembered the man-ape, with his stump of arm, and the way Jonas’s burns had faded when I ran the Claw along their length. I had not used it or even considered using it since it had failed to save Jolenta.
Now I had kept its secret so long that I was afraid to try it again. I would have touched the dying girl with it, perhaps, if it had not been for her brother looking on; I would have touched the brother’s diseased eye with it if it had not been for the surly mason. As it was, I only labored to breathe against the force that strained my ribs, and did nothing, walking away downhill without noticing in what direction I walked. I heard the mason’s saliva fly from his mouth and smack the eroded stone of the path behind me; but I did not know what the sound was until I was almost back at the Vincula and had more or less returned to myself.
IV
In the Bartizan of the Vincula
“YOU HAVE COMPANY, Lictor,” the sentry told me, and when I only nodded to acknowledge the information, he added, “It might be best for you to change first, Lictor.” I did not need then to ask who my guest was; only the presence of the archon would have drawn that tone from him.
It was not difficult to reach my private quarters without passing through the study where I conducted the business of the Vincula and kept its accounts. I spent the time it took to divest myself of my borrowed jelab and put on my fuligin cloak in speculating as to why the archon, who had never come to me before, and whom, for that matter, I had seldom even seen outside his court, should find it necessary to visit the Vincula — so far as I could see, without an entourage.
The speculation was welcome because it kept certain other thoughts at a distance. There was a large silvered glass in our bedroom, a much more effective mirror than the small plates of polished metal to which I was accustomed; and on it, as I saw for the first time when I stood before it to examine my appearance, Dorcas had scrawled in soap four lines from a song she had once sung for me:
Horns of Urth, you fling notes to the sky, Green and good, green and good. Sing at my step; a sweeter glade have I. Lift, oh, lift me to the fallen wood!
There were several large chairs in the study, and I had anticipated finding the archon in one of them (though it had also crossed my mind that he might be availing himself of the opportunity to go through my papers — something he had every right to do if he chose). He was standing at the embrasure instead, looking out over his city much as I myself had looked out at it from the ramparts of Acies Castle earlier that afternoon. His hands were clasped behind him, and as I watched I saw them move as if each possessed a life of its own, engendered by his thoughts. It was some time before he turned and caught sight of me.
“You are here, Master Torturer. I did not hear you come in.”
“I am only a journeyman, Archon.”
He smiled and seated himself on the sill, his back to the drop. His face was coarse, with a hook nose and large eyes rimmed with dark flesh, but it was not a masculine face; it might almost have been the face of an ugly woman. “Charged by me with the responsibility for this place, you remain a mere journeyman?”
“I can be elevated only by the masters of our guild, Archon.”
“But you are the best of their journeymen, judging from the letter you carried, from their choosing you to send here, and from the work you’ve done since you arrived. Anyway, no one here would know the difference if you chose to put on airs. How many masters are there?”
“I would know, Archon. Only two, unless someone has been elevated since I’ve been gone.”
“I’ll write them and ask them to elevate you in absentia.”
“I thank you, Archon.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and turned to stare out the embrasure as though the situation embarrassed him. “You should have word of it, I suppose, in a month.”
“They will not elevate me, Archon. But it will make Master Palaemon happy to hear you think so well of me.”
He swung around again to look at me. “We need not be so formal, surely. My name is Abdiesus, and there is no reason you should not use it when we’re alone. You’re Severian, I believe?”
I nodded.
He turned away again. “This is a very low opening. I was examining it before you came in, and the wall hardly reaches above my knees. It would be easy, I’m afraid, for someone to fall out of it.”
“Only for someone as tall as yourself, Abdiesus.”
“In the past, were not executions performed, occasionally, by casting the victim from a high window or from the edge of a precipice?”
“Yes, both those methods have been employed.”
“Not by you, I suppose.” Once more he faced me.
“Not within living memory, so far as I know, Abdiesus. I have performed decollations — both with the block and with the chair — but that is all.”
“But you would have no objection to the use of other means? If you were instructed to employ them?”
“I am here to carry out the archon’s sentences.”
“There are times, Severian, when public executions serve the public good. There are others when they would only do harm by inciting public unrest.”
“That is understood, Abdiesus,” I said. As sometimes I have seen in the eyes of a boy the worry of the man he will be, I could see the future guilt that had already come (perhaps without his being aware of it) to settle on the archon’s face.
“There will be a few guests at the palace tonight. I hope that you will be among them, Severian.”
I bowed. “Among the divisions of administration, Abdiesus, it has long been customary to exclude one — my own — from the society of the others.”
“And you feel that is unjust, which is wholly natural. Tonight, if you wish to think of it in that way, we will be making some restitution.”
“We of the guild have never complained of injustice. Indeed, we have gloried in our unique isolation. Tonight, however, the others may feel they have reason to protest to you.”
A smile twitched at his mouth. “I’m not concerned about that Here, this will get you onto the grounds.” He extended his hand, holding delicately, as though he feared it would flutter from his fingers, one of those disks of stiff paper, no bigger than a chrisos and lettered in gold leaf with ornate characters, of which I had often heard Thecla speak (she stirred in my mind at the touch of it), but which I had never before seen.
“Thank you, Archon. Tonight, you said? I will try to find suitable clothing.”
“Come dressed as you are. It’s to be a ridotto — your habit will be your costume.” He stood and stretched himself with the air, I thought, of one who nears the completion of a long and disagreeable task. “A moment ago we spoke of some of the less elaborate ways that you might perform your function. It might be well for you to bring whatever equipment you will require tonight.”
I understood. I would need nothing beyond my hands, and told him so; then, feeling I had already been remiss in my duties as his host, I invited him to take what refreshment we had.
“No,” he said. “If you knew how much I am forced to eat and drink for courtesy’s sake, you’d know how much I relish the company of someone whose hospitable offers I can refuse. I don’t suppose your fraternity has ever considered using food as a torment, instead of starvation?”
“It is called planteration, Archon.”
“You must tell me about it sometime. I can see your guild is far ahead of my imagination — no doubt by a dozen centuries. After hunting, yours must be the oldest science of them all. But I cannot stay longer. We will see you at evening?”
“It is nearly evening now, Archon.”
“At the end of the next watch the
n.”
He went out; it was not until the door closed behind him that I detected the faint odor of the musk that had perfumed his robe.
I looked at the little circle of paper I held, turning it over in my hand. Pictured on the back were a falsity of masks, in which I recognized one of the horrors — a face that was no more than a mouth ringed with fangs — I had seen in the Autarch’s garden when the cacogens tore away their disguises, and a man-ape’s face from the abandoned mine near Saltus.
I was tired from my long walk as well as from the work (almost a full day’s, for I had risen early) that had preceded it; and so before going out again I undressed and washed myself, ate some fruit and cold meat, and sipped a glass of the spicy northern tea. When a problem troubles me deeply, it remains in my mind even when I am unaware of it. So it was with me then; though I was not conscious of them, the thought of Dorcas lying in her narrow, slant-ceilinged room in the inn and the memory of the dying girl on her straw bound my eyes and stopped my ears. It was because of them, I think, that I did not hear my sergeant, and did not know, until he entered, that I had been taking up kindling from its box beside the fireplace and breaking the sticks with my hands. He asked if I were going out again, and since he was responsible for the operation of the Vincula in my absence I told him I was, and that I could not say when I would return. Then I thanked him for the loan of his jelab, which I said I would not need again.
“You are welcome to it anytime, Lictor. But that was not what concerned me. I wanted to suggest that you take a couple of our clavigers when you go down to the city.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But it is well policed, and I will be in no danger.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s a matter of the prestige of the Vincula, Lictor. As our commander, you should have an escort.”
I could see he was lying, but I could also see that he was lying for what he believed to be my good, and so I said, “I will consider it, assuming you have two presentable men you can spare.”