by Gene Wolfe
XV
He Is Ahead of You!
THE HUSBAND WHO was supposed to have come before supper did not come, and the four of us — the woman, the old man, the boy, and I — ate the evening meal without him. I had at first thought his wife’s prediction a lie intended to deter me from whatever criminality I might otherwise have committed; but as the sullen afternoon wore on in that silence that presages a storm, it became apparent that she had believed what she had said, and was now sincerely worried.
Our supper was as simple, almost, as such a meal can be; but my hunger was so great that it was one of the most gratifying I recall. We had boiled vegetables without salt or butter, coarse bread, and a little meat. No wine, no fruit, nothing fresh and nothing sweet; yet I think I must have eaten more than the other three together.
When our meal was over, the woman (whose name, I had learned, was Casdoe) took a long, iron-shod staff out of a corner and set off to look for her husband, first assuring me that she required no escort and telling the old man, who seemed not to hear her, that she would not go far and would soon return. Seeing him remain as abstracted as ever before his fire, I coaxed the boy to me, and after I had won his confidence by showing him Terminus Est and permitting him to hold her hilt and attempt to lift her blade, I asked him whether Severa should not come down and take care of him now that his mother was away.
“She came back last night,” he told me.
I thought he was referring to his mother and said, “I’m sure she’ll come back tonight too, but don’t you think Severa ought to take care of you now, while she’s gone?”
As children who are not sufficiently confident of language to argue sometimes do, the boy shrugged and tried to turn away.
I caught him by the shoulders. “I want you to go upstairs now, little Severian, and tell her to come down. I promise I won’t hurt her.”
He nodded and went to the ladder, though slowly and reluctantly. “Bad woman,” he said.
Then, for the first time since I had been in the house, the old man spoke. “Becan, come over here! I want to tell you about Fechin.” It was a moment before I understood that he was addressing me under the impression that I was his son-in-law.
“He was the worst of us all, that Fechin. A tall, wild boy with red hair on his hands, on his arms. Like a monkey’s arms, so that if you saw them reaching around the corner to take something, you’d think, except for the size, that it was a monkey taking it. He took our copper pan once, the one Mother used to make sausage in, and I saw his arm and didn’t tell who had done it, because he was my friend. I never found it again, never saw it again, though I was with him a thousand times. I used to think he had made a boat of it and sailed it on the river, because that was what I had always wanted to do with it myself. I walked down the river trying to find it, and the night came before I ever knew it, before I had even turned around to go home. Maybe he polished the bottom to look in — sometimes he drew his own likeness. Maybe he filled it with water to see his reflection.”
I had gone across the room to listen to him, partly because he spoke indistinctly and partly out of respect, for his aged face reminded me a little of Master Palaemon’s, though he had his natural eyes. “I once met a man of your age who had posed for Fechin,” I said.
The old man looked up at me; as quickly as the shadow of a bird might cross some gray rag thrown out of the house upon the grass, I saw the realization that I was not Becan come and go. He did not stop speaking, however, or in any other way acknowledge the fact. It was as if what he was saying were so urgent that it had to be told to someone, poured into any ears before it was lost forever.
“His face wasn’t a monkey’s face at all. Fechin was handsome — the handsomest around. He could always get food or money from a woman. He could get anything from women. I remember once when we were walking down the trail that led to where the old mill stood then. I had a piece of paper the schoolmaster had given me. Real paper, not quite white, but with a touch of brown to it, and little speckles here and there, so it looked like a trout in milk. The schoolmaster gave it to me so I could write a letter for Mother — at the school we always wrote on boards, then washed them clean with a sponge when we had to write again, and when nobody was looking we’d hit the sponge with the board and send it flying against the wall, or somebody’s head. But Fechin loved to draw, and while we walked I thought about that, and how his face would look if he had paper to make a picture he could keep.
“They were the only things he kept. Everything else he lost, or gave away, or threw away, and I knew what Mother wanted to tell pretty much, and I decided if I wrote small I could get it on half the paper. Fechin didn’t know I had it, but I took it out and showed it to him, then folded it and tore it in two.”
Over our heads, I could hear the fluting voice of the little boy, though I could not understand what he was saying.
“That was the brightest day I’ve ever seen. The sun had new life to him, the way a man will when he was sick yesterday and will be sick tomorrow, but today he walks around and laughs so that if a stranger was to come he’d think there was nothing wrong, no sickness at all, that the medicines and the bed were for somebody else. They always say in prayers that the New Sun will be too bright to look at, and I always up until that day had taken it to be just the proper way of talking, the way you say a baby’s beautiful, or praise whatever a good man has made for himself, that even if there were two suns in the sky you could look at both. But that day I learned it was all true, and the light of it on Fechin’s face was more than I could stand. It made my eyes water. He said thank you, and we went farther along and came to a house where a girl lived.
I can’t remember what her name was, but she was truly beautiful, the way the quietest are sometimes. I never knew up till then that Fechin knew her, but he asked me to wait, and I sat down on the first step in front of the gate.”
Someone heavier than the boy was walking overhead, toward the ladder.
“He wasn’t inside long, but when he came out, with the girl looking out the window, I knew what they had done. I looked at him, and he spread those long, thin, monkey arms. How could he share what he’d had? In the end, he made the girl give me half a loaf of bread and some fruit. He drew my picture on one side of the paper and the girl’s on the other, but he kept the pictures.”
The ladder creaked, and I turned to look. As I had expected, a woman was descending it. She was not tall, but full-figured and narrow-waisted; her gown was nearly as ragged as the boy’s mother’s, and much dirtier. Rich brown hair spilled down her back. I think I recognized her even before she turned and I saw the high cheekbones and her long, brown eyes — it was Agia. “So you knew I was here all along,” she said.
“I might make the same remark to you. You seem to have been here before me.”
“I only guessed that you would be coming this way. As it happened, I arrived a little before you, and I told the mistress of this house what you would do to me if she did not hide me,” she said. (I supposed she wished me to know she had an ally here, if only a feeble one.)
“You’ve been trying to kill me ever since I glimpsed you in the crowd at Saltus.”
“Is that an accusation? Yes.”
“You’re lying.”
It was one of the few times I have ever seen Agia caught off balance. “What do you mean?”
“Only that you were trying to kill me before Saltus.”
“With the avern. Yes, of course.”
“And afterward. Agia, I know who Hethor is.”
I waited for her to reply, but she said nothing.
“On the day we met, you told me there was an old sailor who wanted you to live with him. Old and ugly and poor, you called him, and I could not understand why you, a lovely young woman, should even consider his offer when you were not actually starving. You had your twin to protect you, and a little money coming in from the shop.”
It was my turn to be surprised. She said, “I should have gone to him a
nd mastered him. I have mastered him now.”
“I thought you had only promised yourself to him, if he would kill me.”
“I have promised him that and many other things, and so mastered him. He is ahead of you, Severian, waiting word from me.”
“With more of his beasts? Thank you for the warning. That was it, wasn’t it? He had threatened you and Agilus with the pets he had brought from other spheres.”
She nodded. “He came to sell his clothes, and they were the kind worn on the old ships that sailed beyond the world’s rim long ago, and they weren’t costumes or forgeries or even tomb-tender old garments that had lain for centuries in the dark, but clothes not far from new. He said his ships — all those ships — became lost in the blackness between the suns, where the years do not turn. Lost so that even Time cannot find them.”
“I know,” I said. “Jonas told me.”
“After I learned that you would kill Agilus, I went to him. He is iron-strong in some ways, weak in many others. If I had withheld my body I could have done nothing with him, but I did all the queer things he wished me to, and made him believe I love him. Now he will do anything I ask. He followed you for me after you killed Agilus; with his silver I hired the men you killed at the old mine, and the creatures he commands will kill you for me yet, if I don’t do it here myself.”
“You meant to wait until I slept, and then come down and murder me, I suppose.”
“I would have waked you first, when I had my knife at your throat. But the child told me you knew I was here, and I thought this might be more pleasant. Tell me though — how did you guess about Hethor?”
A breath of wind stirred through the narrow windows. It made the fire smoke, and I heard the old man, who sat there in silence once more, cough, and spit onto the coals. The little boy, who had climbed down from the loft while Agia and I talked, watched us with large, uncomprehending eyes.
“I should have known it long before,” I said. “My friend Jonas had been just such a sailor. You will remember him, I think — you glimpsed him at the mine mouth, and you must have known of him.”
“We did.”
“Perhaps they were from the same ship. Or perhaps it was only that each would have known the other by some sign, or that Hethor at least feared they would. However that may be, he seldom came near me when I was traveling with Jonas, though he had been so eager to be in my company before. I saw him in the crowd when I executed a woman and a man at Saltus, but he did not try to join me there. On the way to the House Absolute, Jonas and I saw him behind us, but he did not come running up until Jonas had ridden off, though he must have been desperate to get back his notule. When he was thrown into the antechamber of the House Absolute, he made no attempt to sit with us, even though Jonas was nearly dead; but something that left a trail of slime was searching the place when we left it.”
Agia said nothing, and in her silence she might have been the young woman I had seen on the morning of the day after I left our tower unfastening the gratings that had guarded the windows of a dusty shop.
“You two must have lost my trail on the way to Thrax,” I continued, “or been delayed by some accident. Even after you discovered we were in the city, you must not have known that I had charge of the Vincula, because Hethor sent his creature of fire prowling the streets to find me. Then, somehow, you found Dorcas at the Duck’s Nest—”
“We were lodging there ourselves,” Agia said. “We had only arrived a few days before, and we were out looking for you when you came. Afterward when I realized that the woman in the little garret room was the mad girl you had found in the Botanic Gardens, we still didn’t guess it was you who had put her there, because that hag at the inn said the man had worn common clothes. But we thought she might know where you were, and that she would be more apt to talk to Hethor. His name isn’t really Hethor, by the way. He says it’s a much older one, that hardly anyone has heard of now.”
“He told Dorcas about the fire creature,” I said, “and she told me. I had heard of the thing before, but Hethor had a name for it — he called it a salamander. I didn’t think anything of it when Dorcas mentioned it, but later I remembered that Jonas had a name for the black thing that flew after us outside the House Absolute. He called it a notule, and said the people on the ships had named them that because they betrayed themselves with a gust of warmth. If Hethor had a name for the fire creature, it seemed likely that it was a sailor’s name too, and that he had something to do with the creature itself.”
Agia smiled thinly. “So now you know all, and you have me where you want me — provided you can swing that big blade of yours in here.”
“I have you without it. I had you beneath my foot at the mine mouth, for that matter.”
“But I still have my knife.”
At that moment the boy’s mother came through the doorway, and both of us paused. She looked in astonishment from Agia to me; then, as though no surprise could pierce her sorrow or alter what she had to do, she closed the door and lifted the heavy bar into place.
Agia said, “He heard me upstairs, Casdoe, and made me come down. He intends to kill me.”
“And how am I to prevent that?” the woman answered wearily. She turned to me. “I hid her because she said you meant her harm. Will you kill me too?”
“No. Nor will I kill her, as she knows.”
Agia’s face distorted with rage, as the face of another lovely woman, molded by Fechin himself perhaps in colored wax, might have been transformed with a gout of flame, so that it simultaneously melted and burned. “You killed Agilus, and you gloried in it! Aren’t I as fit to die as he was? We were the same flesh!” I had not fully believed her when she said she was armed with a knife, but without my having seen her draw it, it was out now — one of the crooked daggers of Thrax.
For some time the air had been heavy with an impending storm. Now the thunder rolled, booming among the peaks above us. When its echoings and reechoings had almost died away, something answered them. I cannot describe that voice; it was not quite a human shout, nor was it the mere bellow of a beast.
All her weariness left the woman Casdoe, replaced by the most desperate haste. Heavy wooden shutters stood against the wall beneath each of the narrow windows; she seized the nearest, and lifting it as if it weighed no more than a pie pan sent it crashing into place. Outside, the dog barked frantically then fell silent, leaving no sound but the pattering of the first rain.
“So soon,” Casdoe cried. “So soon!” To her son: “Severian, get out of the way.”
Through one of the still open windows, I heard a child’s voice call, “Father, can’t you help me?”
XVI
The Alzabo
I TRIED TO assist Casdoe, and in the process turned my back on Agia and her dagger. It was an error that almost cost me my life, for she was upon me as soon as I was encumbered with a shutter. Women and tailors hold the blade beneath the hand, according to the proverb, but Agia stabbed up to open the tripes and catch the heart from below, like an accomplished assassin. I turned only just in time to block her blade with the shutter, and the point drove through the wood to show a glint of steel.
The very strength of her blow betrayed her. I wrenched the shutter to one side and threw it across the room, and her knife with it. She and Casdoe both leaped for it. I caught Agia by an arm and jerked her back, and Casdoe slammed the shutter into place with the knife out, toward the gathering storm.
“You fool,” Agia said. “Don’t you realize you’re giving a weapon to whomever it is you’re afraid of?” Her voice was calm with defeat.
“It has no need of knives,” Casdoe told her.
The house was dark now except for the ruddy light of the fire. I looked around for candles or lanterns, but there were none in sight; later I learned that the few the family owned had been carried to the loft. Lightning flashed outside, outlining the edges of the shutters and making a broken line of stark light at the bottom of the door — it was a moment before I
realized that it had been a broken line, when it should have been a continuous one. “There’s someone outside,” I said. “Standing on the step.”
Casdoe nodded. “I closed the window just in time. It has never come so early before. It may be that the storm wakened it.”
“You don’t think it might be your husband?”
Before she could answer me, a voice higher than the little boy’s called, “Let me in, Mother.”
Even I, who did not know what it was that spoke, sensed a fearful wrongness in the simple words. It was a child’s voice, perhaps, but not a human child’s.
“Mother,” the voice called again. “It is beginning to rain.”
“We had better go up,” Casdoe said. “If we pull the ladder after us, it cannot reach us even if it should get inside.”
I had gone to the door. Without lightning, the feet of whatever it was that stood on the doorstep were invisible; but I could hear a hoarse, slow breathing above the beating of the rain, and once a scraping sound, as though the thing that waited there in the dark had shifted its footing.
“Is this your doing?” I asked Agia. “Some creature of Hethor’s?”
She shook her head; the narrow, brown eyes were dancing. “They roam wild in these mountains, as you should know much better than I.”
“Mother?”
There was a shuffle of feet — with that fretful question, the thing outside had turned from the door. One of the shutters was cracked, and I tried to look through the slit; I could see nothing in the blackness outside, but I heard a soft, heavy tread, precisely the sound that sometimes came through the barred ports of the Tower of the Bear at home.
“It took Severa three days ago,” Casdoe said. She was trying to get the old man to rise; he did so slowly, reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire. “I never let her or Severian go among the trees, but it came into the clearing here, a watch before twilight. Since then it has returned every night. The dog wouldn’t track it, but Becan went to hunt it today.”