by Wolfe, Gene
“You were in our audience, I take it,” said Dr. Talos. “I can well sympathize with your desire to see the performance again. But we won’t be able to oblige you until evening, and by then we hope to be some distance from here.”
Hethor, whom I had met outside Agilus’s prison with the fat man, the hungry-eyed woman and the others, did not seem to have heard him. He was staring at me, with occasional glances toward Baldanders and Dorcas. “He hurt you, didn’t he? Writhing, writhing. I saw you with the blood running, red as pentecost. Wh-wh-what honor for you! You serve him too, and your calling is higher than mine.”
Dorcas shook her head and turned her face away. The giant only stared. Dr. Talos said, “Surely you understand that what you saw was a theatrical performance.” (I remember thinking that if most of the audience had had a firmer grip on that idea, we would have found ourselves in an embarrassing dilemma when Baldanders jumped from the stage.)
“I u-understand more than you think, I the old captain, the old lieutenant, the old c-c-cook in his old kitchen, cooking soup, cooking broth for the dying pets! My master is real, but where are your armies? Real, and where are your empires? Sh-shall false blood run from a true wound? Where is your strength when the b-b-blood is gone, where is the luster of the silken hair? I w-will catch it in a cup of glass, I, the old c-captain of the old limping sh-ship, with its crew black against the silver sails, and the C-c-coalsack behind it.”
Perhaps I should say here that at the time I paid little attention to the rush and stumble of Hethor’s words, though my ineradicable memory enables me to recreate them on paper now. He spoke a gobbling singsong, with a fine spray of spittle flying through the gaps in his teeth. In his slow way, Baldanders may have understood him. Dorcas, I feel sure, was too repelled by him to hear much of what he said. She turned aside as one turns from the mutterings and cracking bones when an alzabo savages a carcass, and Jolenta listened to nothing that did not concern herself.
“You can see for yourself that the young woman is unharmed.” Dr. Talos rose and put away his money box. “It’s always a pleasure to speak to someone who has appreciated our performance, but I’m afraid we’ve work to do. We must pack. If you’ll excuse us?”
Now that his conversation had become one with Dr. Talos exclusively, Hethor put his cap on again, pulling it down until it nearly covered his eyes. “Stowage? There’s no one better for it than I, the old s-supercargo, the old chandler and steward, the old st-stevedore. Who else shall put the kernels back on the cob, fit the f-fledgling into the egg again? Who shall fold the solemn-winged m-moth, with w-wings each like stuns’ls, into the broken cocoon left h-hanging like a s-s-sarcophagus? And for the love of the M-master, I’ll do it, for the sake of the M-master, I’ll do it. And f-f-f-follow anywhere, anywhere he goes.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. Just at the moment, Baldanders—who had apparently caught the references to packing if he had caught nothing else—scooped a backdrop from the stage and began to wind it on its pole. Hethor vaulted up with unexpected agility to fold the set for the Inquisitor’s chamber and reel in the projector wires. Dr. Talos turned to me as if to say, He’s your responsibility after all, just as Baldanders is mine.
“There are a good many of them,” I told him. “They find pleasure in pain, and want to associate with us just as a normal man might want to be around Dorcas and Jolenta.”
The doctor nodded. “I wondered. One can imagine an ideal servant who serves out of pure love for his master, just as one can an ideal rustic who remains a ditcher from a love of nature, or an ideal fricatrice who spreads her legs a dozen times a night from a love of copulation. But one never encounters these fabulous creatures in reality.”
In about a watch we were on the road. Our small theater packed itself quite neatly into a huge barrow formed from parts of the stage, and Baldanders, who wheeled this contraption, also carried a few odds and ends on his back. Dr. Talos, with Dorcas, Jolenta, and me behind him, led the way, and Hethor followed Baldanders at a distance of perhaps a hundred paces.
“He’s like me,” Dorcas said, glancing back. “And the doctor is like Agia, only not as bad. Do you remember? She couldn’t make me go away, and eventually you made her stop trying.”
I did remember, and asked why she had followed us with such determination.
“You were the only people I knew. I was more afraid of being alone than I was of Agia.”
“Then you were afraid of Agia.”
“Yes, very much. I still am. But … I don’t know where I’ve been, but I think I’ve been alone, wherever I was. For a long time. I didn’t want to do that anymore. You won’t understand this—or like it—but …”
“Yes?”
“If you had hated me as much as Agia did, I would have followed you anyway.”
“I don’t think Agia hated you.”
Dorcas stared up at me, and I can see that piquant face now as well as if it were reflected in the quiet well of vermilion ink. It was, perhaps, a trifle pinched and pale, too childlike for great beauty; but the eyes were bits of the azure firmament of some hidden world waiting for Man; they could have vied with Jolenta’s own. “She hated me,” Dorcas said softly. “She hates me more now. Do you remember how dazed you were after the fight? You never looked back when I led you away. I did, and I saw her face.”
Jolenta had been complaining to Dr. Talos because she had to walk. Baldanders’s deep, dull voice came from behind us now. “I will carry you.”
She glanced back at him. “What? On top of all the rest?”
He did not reply.
“When I say I want to ride, I don’t mean, as you seem to think, like a fool at a flogging.”
In my imagination, I saw the giant’s sad nod.
Jolenta was afraid of looking foolish, and what I am going to write now will sound foolish indeed, though it is true. You, my reader, may enjoy yourself at my expense. It struck me then how fortunate I was, and how fortunate I had been since leaving the Citadel. Dorcas I knew was my friend—more than a lover, a true companion, though we had been together only a few days. The giant’s heavy tread behind me reminded me of how many men there are who wander Urth utterly alone. I knew then (or thought I did) why Baldanders chose to obey Dr. Talos, bending his mighty strength to whatever task the red-haired man laid on him.
A touch at my shoulder took me from my revery. It was Hethor, who must have come up silently from his position in the rear. “Master,” he said.
I told him not to call me that, and explained that I was only a journeyman of my guild, and would probably never attain to mastership.
He nodded humbly. Through his open lips I could glimpse the broken incisors. “Master, where do we go?”
“Out the gate,” I said, and told myself I said it because I wanted him to follow Dr. Talos and not me; the truth was that I was thinking of the preternatural beauty of the Claw, and how sweet it would be to carry it to Thrax with me, instead of retracing my steps to the center of Nessus. I gestured toward the Wall, which now rose in the distance as the walls of a common fortress must rise before a mouse. They were black as thunderheads, and held certain clouds captive at their summit.
“I will carry your sword, Master.”
The offer seemed honestly made, though I was reminded that the plot Agia and her brother had conceived against me had been born of their desire for Terminus Est. As firmly as I could, I said, “No. Not now or ever.”
“I feel pity for you, Master, seeing you walk with it on your shoulder so. It must be very heavy.”
I was explaining, quite truthfully, that it was not as burdensome as it appeared, when we rounded the side of a gentle hill and saw half a league off a straight highway running toward an opening in the Wall. It was crowded with carts and wagons and traffic of all kinds, all dwarfed by the Wall and the towering gate until the people looked like mites and the beasts like ants pulling at little crumbs. Dr. Talos turned until he was walking backward and waved at the Wall as proudly as if h
e had built it himself.
“Some of you, I think, have never seen this. Severian? Ladies? Have you been this near before?”
Even Jolenta shook her head, and I said, “No. I’ve spent my life so near the middle of the city that the Wall was no more than a dark line on the northern horizon when we looked from the glass-roofed room at the top of our tower. I am astounded, I admit.”
“The ancients built well, did they not? Think—after so many millennia, all the open area through which we have passed today yet remains for the growth of the city. But Baldanders is shaking his head. Don’t you see, my dear patient, that all these bosquets and pleasant meadows among which we have journeyed this morning will one day be displaced by buildings and streets?”
Baldanders said, “They were not for the growing of Nessus.”
“Of course, of course. I’m sure you were there, and know all about it.” The doctor winked at the rest of us. “Baldanders is older than I, and so believes he knows everything. Sometimes.”
We were soon within a hundred paces or so of the highway, and Jolenta’s attention became fixed on its traffic. “If there’s a litter for hire, you must get it for me,” she told Dr. Talos. “I won’t be able to perform tonight if I have to walk all day.”
He shook his head. “You forget, I have no money. Should you see a litter and wish to engage it, you are of course free to do so. If you cannot appear tonight, your understudy will take your role.”
“My understudy?”
The doctor gestured toward Dorcas. “I’m certain she is eager to try the starring part, and that she will do famously. Why do you think I permitted her to join us and share in the proceeds? Less rewriting will be necessary than if we have two women.”
“She will go with Severian, you fool. Didn’t he say this morning he was going back to look for—” Jolenta wheeled on me, more beautiful than ever for being angry. “What did you call them? Pelisses?”
I said, “Pelerines.” And at this a man riding a merychip at the edge of the concourse of people and animals reined his diminutive mount over. “If you’re looking for the Pelerines,” he said, “your way lies with mine—out the gate, not toward the city. They passed along this road last night.”
I quickened my step until I could grasp the cantle of his saddle, and asked if he were sure of his information.
“I was disturbed when the other patrons of my inn rushed into the road to receive their blessing,” the man on the merychip said. “I looked out the window and saw their procession. Their servants carried deeses illuminated with candles but reversed, and the priestesses themselves had torn their habits.” His face, which was long and worn and humorous, split in a wry grin. “I don’t know what was wrong, but believe me, their departure was impressive and unmistakable—that’s what the bear said, you know, about the picnickers.”
Dr. Talos whispered to Jolenta, “I think the angel of agony there, and your understudy, will remain with us a while longer.”
As it proved, he was half in error. No doubt you, who have perhaps seen the Wall many times, and perhaps passed often through one or another of its gates, will be impatient with me; but before I continue this account of my life, I find I must for my own peace spend a few words on it.
I have already spoken of its height. There are few sorts of birds, I think, that would fly over it. The eagle and the great mountain teratornis, and possibly the wild geese and their allies; but few others. This height I had come to expect by the time we reached the base: the Wall had been in plain view then for many leagues, and no one who saw it, with the clouds moving across its face as ripples do across a pond, could fail to realize its altitude. It is of black metal, like the walls of the Citadel, and for this reason it seemed less terrible to me than it would have otherwise—the buildings I had seen in the city were of stone or brick, and to come now on the material I had known from earliest childhood was no unpleasant thing.
Yet to enter the gate was to enter a mine, and I could not suppress a shudder. I noticed too that everyone around me except for Dr. Talos and Baldanders seemed to feel as I did. Dorcas clasped my hand more tightly, and Hethor hung his head. Jolenta seemed to consider that the doctor, with whom she had been quarreling a moment before, might protect her; but when he paid no heed to her touch at his arm and continued to swagger forward and pound the pavement with his stick just as he had in the sunlight, she left him and to my astonishment took the stirrup strap of the man on the merychip.
The sides of the gate rose high above us, pierced at wide intervals by windows of some material thicker, yet clearer, than glass. Behind these windows we could see the moving figures of men and women, and of creatures that were neither men nor women. Cacogens, I think, were there, beings to whom the avern was but what a marigold or a marguerite is to us. Others seemed beasts with too much of men about them, so that horned heads watched us with eyes too wise, and mouths that appeared to speak showed teeth like nails or hooks. I asked Dr. Talos what these creatures were.
“Soldiers,” he said. “The pandours of the Autarch.”
Jolenta, whose fear made her press the side of one full breast against the thigh of the man on the merychip, whispered, “Whose perspiration is the gold of his subjects.”
“Within the Wall itself, Doctor?”
“Like mice. Although it is of immense thickness, it’s honey-combed every-where—so I am given to understand. In its passages and galleries there dwell an innumerable soldiery, ready to defend it just as termites defend their ox-high earthen nests on the pampas of the north. This is the fourth time Baldanders and I have passed through, for once, as we told you, we came south, entering Nessus by this gate and going out a year afterward through the gate calling Sorrowing. Only recently we returned from the south with what little we had won there, passing in at the other southern gate, that of Praise. On all these passages we beheld the interior of the Wall as you see it now, and the faces of these slaves of the Autarch looked out at us. I do not doubt that there are among them many who search for some particular miscreant, and that if they were to see the one they seek, they would sally out and lay hold of him.”
At this the man on the merychip (whose name was Jonas, as I learned later) said, “I beg your pardon, optimate, but I could not help overhearing what you said. I can enlighten you further, if you wish.”
Dr. Talos glanced at me, his eyes sparkling. “Why that would be pleasant, but we must make one proviso. We will speak only of the Wall, and those who dwell in it. Which is to say, we will ask you no questions concerning yourself. And you, likewise, will return that courtesy to us.”
The stranger pushed back his battered hat, and I saw that in place of his right hand he wore a jointed contrivance of steel. “You have understood me better than I wanted, as the man said when he looked in the mirror. I admit I’d hoped to ask you why you traveled with the carnifex, and why this lady, the loveliest I’ve ever seen, is walking in the dust.”
Jolenta released his stirrup strap and said, “You’re poor, goodman, from the look of you, and no longer young. It hardly suits you to inquire of me.”
Even in the shadow of the gate, I saw the flush of blood creep into the stranger’s cheeks. All she had said was true. His clothes were worn and travel-stained, though not so dirty as Hethor’s. His face had been lined and coarsened by the wind. For perhaps a dozen steps he did not reply, but at last he began. His voice was flat and neither high nor deep, but possessed of a dry humor.
“In the old times, the lords of this world feared no one but their own people, and to defend themselves against them built a great fortress on a hilltop to the north of the city. It was not called Nessus then, for the river was unpoisoned.
“Many of the people were angry at the building of that citadel, holding it to be their right to slay their lords without hindrance if they so desired. But others went out in the ships that ply between the stars, returning with treasure and knowledge. In time there returned a woman who had gained nothing among them but a handfu
l of black beans.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Talos. “You are a professional tale-teller. I wish you had informed us of it from the beginning, for we, as you must have seen, are something the same.”
Jonas shook his head. “No, this is the only tale I know—or nearly so.” He looked down at Jolenta. “May I continue, most marvelous of women?”
My attention was distracted by the sight of daylight ahead of us, and by the disturbance among the vehicles that clogged the road as many sought to turn back, flailing their teams and trying to clear a path with their whips.
“—she displayed the beans to the lords of men, and told them that unless she were obeyed she would cast them into the sea and so put an end to the world. They had her seized and torn to bits, for they were a hundred times more complete in their domination than our Autarch.”
“May he endure to see the New Sun,” Jolenta murmured.
Dorcas tightened her grip on my arm and asked, “Why are they so frightened?” Then screamed and buried her face in her hands as the iron tip of a lash flicked her cheek. I pressed past the merychip’s head, seized the ankle of the wagoneer who had struck her, and pulled him from his seat. By that time all the gate was ringing with bawling and swearing, and the cries of the injured, and the bellowings of frightened animals; and if the stranger continued his tale I could not hear it.
The driver I pulled down must have died at once. Because I had wished to impress Dorcas, I had hoped to perform the excruciation we call two apricots; but he had fallen under the feet of the travelers and the heavy wheels of the carts. Even his screams were lost.