by Wolfe, Gene
Nearer I fell, and they turned up their faces to me, faces such as I had seen once beneath Gyoll; they were women, naked, with hair of sea-foam green and eyes of coral. Laughing, they watched me fall, and their laughter came bubbling up to me. Their teeth were white and pointed, each a finger’s length.
I fell nearer. Their hands reached up to me and stroked me as a mother strokes her child. The gardens of the palace held sponges and sea anemones and countless other beauties to which I could put no name. The great women circled me round, and I was only a doll before them. “Who are you?” I asked. “And what do you do here?”
“We are the brides of Abaia. The sweethearts and playthings, the toys and valentines of Abaia. The land could not hold us. Our breasts are battering rams, our buttocks would break the backs of bulls. Here we feed, floating and growing, until we are great enough to mate with Abaia, who will one day devour the continents.”
“And who am I?”
Then they laughed all together, and their laughter was like surf upon a beach of glass. “We will show you,” they said. “We will show you!” One took me by each hand, as sisters take their sister’s child, and lifted me up, and swam with me through the garden. Their fingers were webbed, and as long as my arm from shoulder to elbow.
They halted, settling through the water like carracks sinking, until their feet and mine touched the strand. There stood before us a low wall, and on it a little stage and curtain, such as are used for children’s entertainments.
Our roiling of the water seemed to flutter the kerchief-sized cloth. It rippled and swayed, and began to draw back as though teased by an unseen hand. At once there appeared the tiny figure of a man of sticks. His limbs were twigs, still showing bark and green bud. His body was a quarter-span of branch, big through as my thumb, and his head a knot whose whorls formed his eyes and mouth. He carried a club (which he brandished at us) and moved as if he were alive.
When the wooden man had jumped for us, and struck the little stage with his weapon to show his ferocity, there appeared the figure of a boy armed with a sword. This marionette was as finely finished as the other was crude—it might have been a real child reduced to the size of a mouse.
After both had bowed to us, the tiny figures fought. The wooden man performed prodigious leaps and seemed to fill the stage with the blows of his cudgel; the boy danced like a dust mote in a sunbeam to avoid it, darting at the wooden man to slash with his pin-sized blade.
At last the wooden figure collapsed. The boy strode over as if to set his foot upon its chest; but before he could do so, the wooden figure floated from the stage, and turning limply and lazily rose until it vanished from sight, leaving behind the boy, and the cudgel and the sword—both broken. I seemed to hear (no doubt it was really the squeaking of cartwheels on the street outside) a flourish of toy trumpets.
I woke because a third person had come into the room. He was a small, brisk man with fiery red hair, well and even foppishly dressed. When he saw me awake, he threw back the shutters that had covered the window, bringing red sunlight streaming in.
“My partner,” he said, “sleeps soundly always. His snoring didn’t deafen you?”
“I slept well myself,” I told him. “And if he snored, I didn’t hear him.”
That seemed to please the small man, who showed a good many gold teeth when he smiled. “He does. He snores to shake Urth, I assure you. Happy you got your rest anyway.” He extended a delicate, well-cared-for hand. “I am Dr. Talos.”
“The Journeyman Severian.” I threw off the thin coverings and stood up to take it.
“You wear black, I see. What guild is that?”
“It is the fuligin of the torturers.”
“Ah!” He cocked his head to one side like a thrush, and hopped about to look at me from various angles. “You’re a tall fellow—that’s a shame—but all that sooty stuff is very impressive.”
“We find it practical,” I said. “The oubliette is a dirty place, and fuligin doesn’t show bloodstains.”
“You have humor! That’s excellent! There are few advantages, I’ll tell you, that profit a man more than humor. Humor will draw a crowd. Humor will calm a mob or reassure a nursery school. Humor will get you on and get you off, and pull in asimis like a magnet.”
I had only the vaguest idea of what he was saying, but seeing that he was in an affable mood, I ventured, “I hope I didn’t discommode you? The landlord said I was to sleep here, and there was room for another person in the bed.”
“No, no, not at all! I never came back—found a better place to pass the night. I sleep very little, I may as well tell you, and I’m a light sleeper too. But I had a good night of it, an excellent night. Where are you going this morning, optimate?”
I was fumbling under the bed for my boots. “First to look for some breakfast, I suppose. After that, out of the city, to the north.”
“Excellent! No doubt my partner would appreciate a breakfast—it will do him a world of good. And we’re traveling north. After a most successful tour of the city, you know. Going back home now. Played the east bank down, and playing the west up. Perhaps we’ll stop at the House Absolute on our way north. That’s the dream, you know, in the profession. Play the Autarch’s palace. Or come back, if you’ve already played there. Chrisos by the hatful.”
“I’ve met one other person, at least, who dreamed of going back.”
“Don’t put on that long face—you must tell me about him sometime. But now, if we’re to go to breakfast—Baldanders! Wake up! Come, Baldanders, come! Wake up!” He danced to the foot of the bed and grasped the giant by an ankle. “Baldanders! Don’t take him by the shoulder, optimate!” (I had made no motion to do so.) “He thrashes about sometimes. BALDANDERS!”
The giant murmured and stirred.
“A new day, Baldanders! Still alive! Time to eat and defecate and make love—all that! Up now, or we’ll never get home.”
There was no sign that the giant had heard him. It was as if the murmur of the moment before had been only a protest voiced in a dream, or his death rattle. Dr. Talos seized the foul blankets with both hands and swept them back.
The monstrous shape of his partner lay revealed. He was even taller than I had supposed, nearly too tall for the bed, though he slept with his knees drawn almost to his chin. His shoulders were an ell across, high and hunched. His face I could not see; it lay buried in his pillow. There were strange scars about his neck and ears.
“Baldanders!”
His hair was grizzled, and despite the innkeeper’s pretended error, very thick.
“Baldanders! Your pardon, optimate, but may I borrow that sword?”
“No,” I said. “You may not.”
“Oh, I’m not going to kill him, or anything of that sort. I only want to use the flat of it.”
I shook my head, and when Dr. Talos saw I was still adamant, he began to rummage about the room. “Left my stick downstairs. Vile custom, they’ll thieve it. I should learn to limp, I really should. There’s nothing here at all.”
He darted out the door, and was back in a moment carrying an ironwood walking stick with a gilt-brass knob. “Now then! Baldanders!” The strokes fell upon the giant’s broad back like the big raindrops that precede a thunderstorm.
Quite suddenly, the giant sat up. “I’m awake, Doctor.” His face was large and coarse, but sensitive and sad as well. “Have you decided to kill me at last?”
“What are you talking about, Baldanders? Oh, you mean the optimate here. He’s not going to do you any hurt—he shared the bed with you, and now he’s going to join us at breakfast.”
“He slept here, Doctor?”
Dr. Talos and I both nodded.
“Then I know whence my dreams rose.”
I was still saturated with the sight of the huge women beneath the monstered sea, and so I asked what his dreams had been, though I was somewhat in awe of him.
“Of caverns below, where stone teeth dripped blood … Of arms dismembered
found on sanded paths, and things that shook chains in the dark.” He sat at the edge of the bed, cleaning sparse and surprisingly small teeth with one great finger.
Dr. Talos said, “Come on, both of you. If we’re to eat and talk and get anything done today—why, we must be at it. Much to say and much to do.”
Baldanders spat into the corner.
XVI
The Rag Shop
It was on that walk through the streets of still slumbering Nessus that my grief, which was to obsess me so often, first gripped me with all its force. When I had been imprisoned in our oubliette, the enormity of what I had done, and the enormity of the redress I felt sure I would make soon under Master Gurloes’s hands, had dulled it. The day before, when I had swung down the Water Way, the joy of freedom and the poignancy of exile had driven it away. Now it seemed to me that there was no fact in all the world beyond the fact of Thecla’s death. Each patch of darkness among the shadows reminded me of her hair; every glint of white recalled her skin. I could hardly restrain myself from rushing back to the Citadel to see if she might not still be sitting in her cell, reading by the light of the silver lamp.
We found a cafe whose tables were set along the margin of the street. It was still sufficiently early that there was very little traffic. A dead man (he had, I think, been suffocated with a lambrequin, there being those who practice that art) lay at the corner. Dr. Talos went through his pockets, but came back with empty hands.
“Now then,” he said. “We must think. We must contrive a plan.”
A waitress brought mugs of mocha, and Baldanders pushed one toward him. He stirred it with his forefinger.
“Friend Severian, perhaps I should elucidate our situation. Baldanders—he is my only patient—and I hail from the region about Lake Diuturna. Our home burned, and needing a trifle of money to set it right again we decided to venture abroad. My friend is a man of amazing strength. I assemble a crowd, he breaks some timbers and lifts ten men at once, and I sell my cures. Little enough, you will say. But there’s more. I’ve a play, and we’ve assembled properties. When the situation is favorable, he and I enact certain scenes and even invite the participation of some of the audience. Now, friend, you say you are going north, and from your bed last night I take it you are not in funds. May I propose a joint venture?”
Baldanders, who appeared to have understood only the first part of his companion’s speech, said slowly, “It is not entirely destroyed. The walls are stone, very thick. Some of the vaults escaped.”
“Quite correct. We plan to restore the dear old place. But see our dilemma—we’re now halfway on the return leg of our tour, and our accumulated capital is still far from sufficient. What I propose—”
The waitress, a thin young woman with straggling hair, came carrying a bowl of gruel for Baldanders, bread and fruit for me, and a pastry for Dr. Talos. “What an attractive girl!” he said.
She smiled at him.
“Can you sit down? We seem to be your only customers.”
After glancing in the direction of the kitchen, she shrugged and pulled over a chair.
“You might enjoy a bit of this—I’ll be too busy talking to eat such a dry concoction. And a sip of mocha, if you don’t object to drinking after me.”
She said, “You’d think he’d let us eat for nothing, wouldn’t you? But he won’t. Charges everything at full price.”
“Ah! You’re not the owner’s daughter, then. I feared you were. Or his wife. How can he have allowed such a blossom to flourish unplucked?”
“I’ve only worked here about a month. The money they leave on the table’s all I get. Take you three, now. If you don’t give me anything, I will have served you for nothing.”
“Quite so, quite so! But what about this? What if we attempt to render you a rich gift, and you refuse it?” Dr. Talos leaned toward her as he said this, and it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox (a comparison that was perhaps too easy to make because his bristling reddish eyebrows and sharp nose suggested it at once) but that of a stuffed fox. I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos’s face was a fox’s mask on a wall, and I marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity. “Would you refuse it?” he asked again, and I shook myself as though waking.
“What do you mean?” the woman wanted to know. “One of you is a carnifex. Are you talking about the gift of death? The Autarch, whose pores outshine the stars themselves, protects the lives of his subjects.”
“The gift of death? Oh, no!” Dr. Talos laughed. “No, my dear, you’ve had that all your life. So has he. We wouldn’t pretend to give you what is already yours. The gift we offer is beauty, with the fame and wealth that derive from it.”
“If you’re selling something, I haven’t got any money.”
“Selling? Not at all! Quite the contrary, we are offering you new employment. I am a thaumaturge, and these optimates are actors. Have you ever wanted to go on the stage?”
“I thought you looked funny, the three of you.”
“We stand in need of an ingenue. You may claim the position, if you wish. But you must come with us now—we’ve no time to waste, and we won’t come this way again.”
“Becoming an actress won’t make me beautiful.”
“I will make you beautiful because we require you as an actress. It is one of my powers.” He stood up. “Now or not at all. Will you come?”
The waitress rose too, still looking at his face. “I have to go to my room …”
“What do you own but dross? I must cast the glamour and teach you your lines, all in a day. I will not wait.”
“Give me the money for your breakfasts, and I’ll tell him I’m leaving.”
“Nonsense! As a member of our company, you must assist in conserving the funds we will require for your costumes. Not to mention that you ate my pastry. Pay for it yourself.”
For an instant she hesitated. Baldanders said, “You may trust him. The doctor has his own way of looking at the world, but he lies less than people believe.”
The deep, slow voice seemed to reassure her. “All right,” she said, “I’ll go.”
In a few moments, the four of us were several streets away, walking past shops that were still for the most part shuttered. When we had gone some distance, Dr. Talos announced, “And now, my dear friends, we must separate. I will devote my time to the enhancement of this sylph. Baldanders, you must get our collapsing proscenium and the other properties from the inn where you and Severian spent the night—I trust that will present no difficulties. Severian, we will perform, I think, at Ctesiphon’s Cross. Do you know the spot?”
I nodded, though I had no notion of where it might be. The truth was that I had no intention of rejoining them.
Now, as Dr. Talos quick-stepped away with the waitress trotting behind him, I found myself alone with Baldanders on the deserted street. Anxious that he leave too, I asked him where he meant to go. It was more like talking to a monument than speaking with a man.
“There is a park near the river where one may sleep by day, though not by night. When it is nearly dark, I will awaken and collect our belongings.”
“I’m afraid I’m not sleepy. I’m going to look around the city.”
“I will see you then, at Ctesiphon’s Cross.”
For some reason I felt he knew what was in my mind. “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
His eyes were dull as an ox’s as he turned away to lumber with long steps toward Gyoll. Since Baldander’s park lay east and Dr. Talos had taken the waitress west, I resolved to walk north and so continue my journey toward Thrax, the City of Windowless Rooms.
Meanwhile, Nessus, the City Imperishable (the city in which I had lived all my life, though I had seen so little of it), lay all about me. Along a wide, flint-paved avenue I walked, not knowing or caring whether it was a side street or the principal one of the quarter. There were raised paths for pedestrians at either side, and a third in the center, where it served to divide the northbound traffic from the southbound.
To the left and right, buildings seemed to spring from the ground like grain too closely planted, shouldering one another for a place; and what buildings they were—nothing so large as the Great Keep and nothing so old; none, I think, with walls like the metal walls of our tower, five paces through; yet the Citadel had nothing to compare with them in color or originality of conception, nothing so novel and fantastic as each of these structures was, though each stood among a hundred others. As is the fashion in some parts of the city, most of these buildings had shops in their lower levels, though they had not been built for the shops but as guildhalls, basilicas, arenas, conservatories, treasuries, oratories, martellos, asylums, manufacturies, conventicles, hospices, lazarets, mills, refectories, deadhouses, abattoirs, and playhouses. Their architecture reflected these functions, and a thousand conflicting tastes. Turrets and minarets bristled; lanterns, domes, and rotundas soothed; flights of steps as steep as ladders ascended sheer walls; and balconies wrapped facades and sheltered them in the par-terre privacies of citrons and pomegranates.
I was wondering at these hanging gardens amid the forest of pink and white marble, red sardonyx, blue-gray, and cream, and black bricks, and green and yellow and tyrian tiles, when the sight of a lansquenet guarding the entrance to a casern reminded me of the promise I had made the officer of the peltasts the night before. Since I had little money and was well aware that I would require the warmth of my guild cloak by night, the best plan seemed to be to buy a voluminous mantle of some cheap stuff that could be worn over it. Shops were opening, but those that sold clothing all appeared to sell what would not fit my purpose, and at prices greater than I could afford.