Shadow & Claw

by Wolfe, Gene

  Jonas saw nothing of that, being still sprawled on the floor of the howdah, where he was cutting his hands free with the dagger. I made up for him, for I beheld everything as I stood upright, balanced against the pitching of the baluchither’s back and holding up my sword, red now to the hilt. A hundred faces turned toward us, with the face of the exultant on the throne among them, and the heart-shaped face of his consort; and in their eyes I saw what they must have seen at that moment: the great animal bestridden by a headless man, its forequarters dyed with his blood; myself standing erect upon its back, with my sword and fuligin cloak.

  Had I slipped down and sought to flee, or tried to goad the baluchither to greater speed, I would have died. Instead, by the virtue of the spirit that had entered me when I saw the long-dead bodies among the refuse of the mines and the eternal trees, I remained as I was; and the baluchither, with no one to guide him, trod forward steadily (Vodalus’s followers dodging aside to make a path for him) until the dais supporting the throne and canopy were before him. Then he halted, and the dead man pitched forward and fell on the dais at Vodalus’s feet; and I, leaning far out of the howdah, struck the beast behind one leg and the other with the flat of my blade, and he knelt.

  Vodalus smiled a thin smile that held many things, but amusement was one of them, and perhaps the foremost. “I sent my men to fetch the headsman,” he said. “I perceive they succeeded.”

  I saluted with my sword, holding the hilt before my eyes as we were taught to do when an exultant came to observe an execution in the Grand Court. “Sieur, they have brought you the anti-headsman—there was a time when your own would have rolled on fresh-turned soil if it had not been for me.”

  He looked at me more closely then, at my face instead of at my sword and cloak, and after a moment he said, “Yes, you were the youth. Has it been that long?”

  “Just long enough, sieur.”

  “We will talk of this in private, but I have public business to do now. Stand here.” He pointed to the ground at the left of the dais.

  I climbed from the baluchither with Jonas following me, and two grooms led the beast away. There we waited and heard Vodalus give his orders and transmit his plans, reward and punish, for perhaps a watch. All the boasted human panoply of pillars and arches is no more than an imitation in sterile stone of the boles and vaulting branches of the forest, and here it seemed to me that there was scarcely any difference between the two except that the one was gray or white, and the other brown and pale green. Then I believed I understood why all the soldiers of the Autarch and all the thronging retainers of the exultants could not subdue Vodalus—he occupied the mightiest fortress of Urth, greater far than our Citadel, to which I had likened it.

  At length he dismissed the crowd, each man and woman to his or her own place, and came down from the dais to talk to me, bending over me as I might have bent above a child.

  “You served me once,” he said. “For that I will spare your life whatever else befalls, though it may be necessary that you remain my guest for a time. Knowing that your life is no longer in danger, will you serve me again?”

  The oath to the Autarch I had taken on the occasion of my elevation had not the strength to resist the memory of that misty evening with which I have begun this account of my life. Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life. I have often heard it said that gratitude is not to be found. That is not true—those who say so have always looked in the mistaken place. One who truly benefits another is for a moment at a level with the Pancreator, and in gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days; and so I told Vodalus.

  “Good!” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Come. Not far from here we have a meal prepared. If you and your friend will sit with me and eat, I will tell you what must be done.”

  “Sieur, I have disgraced my guild once. I only ask that I may not be made to disgrace it again.”

  “Nothing you do will be known,” Vodalus said. And that satisfied me.

  X

  Thea

  With a dozen or so others we left the glade on foot, and half a league away found a table set among the trees. I was placed at Vodalus’s left hand, and while the others ate, I feigned to and feasted my eyes on him and his lady, whom I had so often recalled as I lay on my cot among the apprentices in our tower.

  When I had saved him, mentally at least I had still been a boy, and to a boy all grown men appear lofty unless they are of very low stature indeed. I saw now that Vodalus was as tall as Thecla or taller, and that Thecla’s half-sister Thea was as tall as she. Then I knew them to be truly of the exalted blood, and not armigers merely, such as Sieur Racho had been.

  It was with Thea that I had first fallen in love, worshipping her because she belonged to the man I had saved. Thecla I had loved, in the beginning, because she recalled Thea. Now (as autumn dies, and winter and spring, and summer comes again, the end of the year as it is its beginning) I loved Thea once more—because she recalled Thecla.

  Vodalus said, “You are an admirer of women,” and I lowered my eyes.

  “I have been little in polite company, sieur. Please forgive me.”

  “I share your admiration, so there is nothing to forgive. But you were not, I hope, studying that slender throat with the thought of parting it?”

  “Never, sieur.”

  “I am delighted to hear it.” He picked up a platter of thrushes, selected one, and put it upon my plate. It was a sign of special favor. “Still, I own I am a trifle surprised. I would have thought that a man in your profession would look on us poor human beings much as a butcher does on cattle.”

  “Of that I cannot inform you, sieur. I have not been bred a butcher.”

  Vodalus laughed. “A touch! I am almost sorry now that you have consented to serve me. If you had only elected to remain my prisoner, we would have had many delightful conversations while I used you—as I had intended to—to cheap for the unfortunate Barnoch’s life. As it is, you will be away by morning. Yet I think I have an errand for you that will consort well with your own inclinations.”

  “If it is your errand, sieur, it must.”

  “You are wasted on the scaffold.” He smiled. “We will find better work for you before long. But if you are to serve me well, you must understand something of the position of the pieces on the board, and the goal of the game we play. Call the sides white and black, and in honor of your garments—so that you shall know where your interests lie—we shall be black. No doubt you have been told that we blacks are mere bandits and traitors, but have you any notion of what it is we strive to do?”

  “To checkmate the Autarch, sieur?”

  “That would be well enough, but it is only a step and not our final goal. You have come from the Citadel—I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history—that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?”

  “Everyone knows,” I said, “that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.”

  “As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”

  The Chatelaine Thea, who must have been listening to Vodalus though she had showed no sign of it, looked across him to me and said in a sweet, cooing voice, “Do you know how our world was renamed, torturer? The dawn-men went to red Verthandi, who was then named War. And because they thought that had an ungracious sound that would keep others from following them, they renamed it, calling it Present. That was a jest in their tongue, for the same word meant Now and The Gift. Or so one of our tutors once explained the matter to my sister and me, though I do not see how any language could endure such confusion.”

  Vodalus listened to her as though he were impatient to speak himself, yet was
too well mannered to interrupt her.

  “Then others—who would have drawn a people to the innermost habitable world for their own reasons—took up the game as well, and called that world Skuld, the World of the Future. Thus our own became Urth, the World of the Past.”

  “You are wrong in that, I fear,” Vodalus told her. “I have it on good authority that this world of ours has been called by that name from the utmost reaches of antiquity. Still, your error is so charming that I would rather have it that you are correct and I mistaken.”

  Thea smiled at that, and Vodalus turned again toward me. “Though it does not explain why Urth is called as she is, my dear Chatelaine’s tale makes the vital point well, which is that in those times mankind traveled by his own ships from world to world, and mastered each, and built on them the cities of Man. Those were the great days of our race, when our fathers’ fathers’ fathers strove for the mastery of the universe.”

  He paused, and because he seemed to expect some comment from me, I said, “Sieur, we are much diminished in wisdom from that age.”

  “Ah, now you strike to the heart. Yet with all your perspicacity, you mistake it. No, we are not diminished in wisdom. We are diminished in power. Study has advanced without letup, but even as men have learned all that is needful for mastery, the strength of the world has been exhausted. We exist now, and precariously, upon the ruin of those who preceded us. While some skim the air in their fliers, ten thousand leagues in a day, we others creep upon the skin of Urth, unable to go from one horizon to the next before the westernmost has lifted itself to veil the sun. You spoke a moment ago of checkmating that mewling fool the Autarch. I want you to conceive now of two autarchs—two great powers striving for mastery. The white seeks to maintain things as they are, the black to set Man’s foot on the road to domination again. I called it the black by chance, but it would be well to remember that it is by night that we see the stars strongly; they are remote and all but invisible in the red light of day. Now, of those two powers, which would you serve?”

  The wind was stirring in the trees, and it seemed to me that everyone at the table had fallen silent, listening to Vodalus and waiting for my reply. I said, “The black, surely.”

  “Good! But as a man of sense you must understand that the way to reconquest cannot be easy. Those who wish no change may sit hugging their scruples forever. We must do everything. We must dare everything!”

  The others had begun to talk and eat again. I lowered my voice until only Vodalus could hear me. “Sieur, there is something I have not told you. I dare not conceal it longer for fear you should think me faithless.”

  He was a better intriguer than I, and turned away before he answered, pretending to eat. “What is it? Out with it.”

  “Sieur,” I said, “I have a relic, the thing they say is the Claw of the Conciliator.”

  He was biting the roasted thigh of a fowl as I spoke. I saw him pause; his eyes turned to look at me, though he did not move his head.

  “Do you wish to see it, sieur? It is very beautiful, and I have it in the top of my boot.”

  “No,” he whispered. “Yes, perhaps, but not here … No, better not at all.”

  “To whom should I give it, then?”

  Vodalus chewed and swallowed. “I had heard from friends I have in Nessus that it was gone. So you have it. You must keep it until you can dispose of it. Do not try to sell it—it would be identified at once. Hide it somewhere. If you must, throw it into a pit.”

  “But surely, sieur, it is very valuable.”

  “It is beyond value, which means it is worthless. You and I are men of sense.” Despite his words, there was a tinge of fear in his voice. “But the rabble believe it to be sacred, a performer of all manner of wonders. If I were to possess it, they would think me a desecrator and an enemy of the Theologoumenon. Our masters would think me turned traitor. You must tell me—”

  Just at that moment, a man I had not seen previously came running up to the table with a look that indicated he bore urgent news. Vodalus rose and walked a few paces away with him, looking very much, I thought, like a handsome schoolmaster with a boy, for the messenger’s head was no higher than his shoulder.

  I ate, thinking he would soon return; but after a long questioning of the messenger he walked away with him, disappearing among the broad trunks of the trees. One by one the others rose too, until no one remained but the beautiful Thea, Jonas and me, and one other man.

  “You are to join us,” Thea said at last in her cooing voice. “Yet you do not know our Ways. Have you need of money?”

  I hesitated, but Jonas said, “That’s something that’s always welcome, Chatelaine, like the misfortunes of an older brother.”

  “Shares will be set aside for you, from this day, of all we take. When you return to us, they will be given to you. Meanwhile I have a purse for each of you to speed you on your way.”

  “We are going, then?” I asked.

  “Were you not told so? Vodalus will instruct you at the supper.”

  I had supposed the meal we were eating would be the final one of the day, and the thought must have been reflected in my face.

  “There will be a supper tonight, when the moon is bright,” Thea said. “Someone will be sent to fetch you.” Then she quoted a scrap of verse:

  “Dine at dawn to open your eyes,

  Dine at noon that you be strong.

  Dine at eve, and then talk long,

  Dine by night, if you’d be wise …

  But now my servant Chuniald will take you to a place where you can rest for your journey.”

  The man, who had been silent until now, stood and said, “Come with me.”

  I told Thea, “I would speak with you, Chatelaine, when we have more leisure. I know something that concerns your schoolmate.”

  She saw that I was serious in what I said, and I saw that she had seen. Then we followed Chuniald through the trees for a distance, I suppose, of a league or more, and at length reached a grassy bank beside a stream. “Wait here,” he said. “Sleep if you can. No one will come until after dark.”

  I asked, “What if we were to leave?”

  “There are those all through this wood who know our liege’s will concerning you,” he said, and turning on his heel, walked away.

  Then I told Jonas what I had seen beside the opened grave, just as I have written it here.

  “I see,” he remarked when I was finished, “why you will join this Vodalus. But you must realize that I am your friend, not his. What I desire is to find the woman you call Jolenta. You want to serve Vodalus, and to go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild—though I confess I don’t understand how such a thing can be stained—and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines.”

  He was smiling by the time he finished this list, and I was laughing.

  “And though you remind me of the old man’s kestrel, that sat on a perch for twenty years and then flew off in all directions, I hope you achieve these things. But I trust you realize that it is possible—just barely possible, perhaps, but possible—that one or two of them may get in the way of four or five of the others.”

  “What you’re saying is very true,” I admitted. “I’m striving to do all those things, and although you won’t credit it, I am giving all my strength and as much of my attention as can be of any benefit to all of them. Yet I have to admit things aren’t going as well as they might. My divided ambitions have landed me in no better place than the shade of this tree, where I am a homeless wanderer. While you, with your single-minded pursuit of one all-powerful objective … look where you are.”

  In such talk we passed the watches of late afternoon. Birds twittered overhead, and it was very pleasant to have such a friend as Jonas, loyal, reasonable, tactful, and filled with wisdom, humor, and prudence. At that time I had no hint of hi
s history, but I sensed that he was being less than candid about his background, and I sought, without venturing direct questions, to draw him out. I learned (or rather, I thought I did) that his father had been a craftsman; that he had been raised by both parents in what he called the usual way, though it is, in fact, rather rare; and that his home had been a seacoast town in the south, but that when he had last visited it he had found it so much changed that he had no desire to remain.

  From his appearance, when I had first encountered him beside the Wall, I had supposed him to be about ten years my elder. From what he said now (and to a lesser extent from some earlier talks we had had) I decided he must be somewhat older; he seemed to have read a good deal of the chronicles of the past, and I was still too naive and unlettered myself, despite the attention Master Palaemon and Thecla had given my mind, to think that anyone much below middle age could have done so. He had a slightly cynical detachment from mankind that suggested he had seen a great deal of the world.

  We were still talking when I glimpsed the graceful figure of the Chatelaine Thea moving among the trees some distance away. I nudged Jonas, and we fell silent to watch her. She was coming toward us without having seen us, so that she moved in the blind way people do who are merely following directions. At times a shaft of sunlight fell upon her face, which, if it chanced to be in profile, suggested Thecla’s so strongly that the sight of it seemed to tear at my chest. She had Thecla’s walk as well, the proud phororhacos stalk that should never have been caged.

  “It must be a truly ancient family,” I whispered to Jonas. “Look at her! Like a dryad. It might be a willow walking.”