by Gene Wolfe
Jolenta and I were of less value. I had no painter's hand, and too little understanding of the necessities of the play even to assist the doctor in arranging our properties. Jolenta, I think, rebelled physically and psychically against any kind of work, and certainly against this. Those long legs, so slender below the knees, so rounded to bursting above them, were inadequate to bear much weight beyond that of her own body; her jutting breasts were in constant danger of having their nipples crushed between lumber or smeared with paint. Nor had she any of that spirit that animates the members of a group forwarding the group's purpose. Dorcas had said that I had been alone the night before, and perhaps she had been more nearly correct than I supposed, but Jolenta was more solitary still. Dorcas and I had each other, Baldanders and the doctor their crooked friendship, and we came together in the performance of the play. Jolenta had only herself, the incessant performance whose sole goal was to garner admiration. She touched my arm, and without speaking rolled enormous emerald eyes to indicate the edge of our natural amphitheater, where a grove of chestnuts lifted white candles among their pale leaves. I saw that none of the others were looking at us and nodded. After Dorcas, Jolenta walking beside me seemed nearly as tall as Thecla, though she took small steps instead of Thecla's swinging strides. She was a head taller than Dorcas at least, her coiffure made her seem taller still, and she wore boots with high, riding heels.
"I want to see it," she said. "It's the only chance I shall ever have." That was a palpable lie, but as though I believed it I said, "The opportunity is symmetric. Today and only today the House Absolute has the opportunity to see you."
She nodded; I had enunciated a profound truth. "I need someone—someone the ones I don't want to talk to will be afraid of. I mean all these showmen and mummers. When you were gone, no one but Dorcas would go with me, and no one is afraid of her. Could you draw that sword and carry it over your shoulder?" I did so.
"If I don't smile, make them leave. Understand?"
Grass much longer than that in the natural amphitheater, but softer than fern, grew among the chestnuts; the path was of quartz pebbles shot with gold. "If only the Autarch saw me, he would desire me. Do you think he will come to our play?"
To please her I nodded, but added, "I have heard he has little use for women, however beautiful, save as advisors, spies, and shield maids."
She stopped and turned, smiling. "That's just it. Don't you see? I can make anyone desire me, and so he, the One Autarch, whose dreams are our reality, whose memories are our history, will desire me too, unmanned or not. You have wanted women other than me, haven't you? Wanted them badly?" I admitted I had.
"And so you think you desire me as you wished for them." She turned and began to walk again, hobbling a little, as it seemed she always did, but invigorated for the moment by her own argument. "But I make every man stiffen and every woman itch. Women who have never loved women wish to love me—did you know that? The same ones come to our performances again and again, and send me their food and their flowers, scarves, shawls, and embroidered kerchiefs with oh, such sisterly, motherly notes. They're going to protect me, protect me from my physician, from his giant, from their husbands and sons and neighbors. And the men! Baldanders has to throw them in the river." I asked if she were lame, and as we emerged from the chestnuts, I looked about for some conveyance for her, but there was nothing.
"My thighs are chafed and it hurts to walk. I have an unguent for them that helps a bit, and a man bought a jennet for me to ride, but I don't know where it's pastured now. I'm really only comfortable when I can keep my legs apart."
"I could carry you."
She smiled again, displaying perfect teeth. "We'd both enjoy that, wouldn't we? But I'm afraid it wouldn't look dignified. No, I'll walk—I just hope I don't have to walk far. I won't walk far, in fact, no matter what happens. No one seems to be about but the mummers anyway. Perhaps the important people are sleeping late to prepare for the night's festivities. I'll have to sleep myself, four watches at least, before I go on."
I heard the sound of water sliding over stones, and having no better goal to seek made for it. We passed through a hawthorn hedge whose spotted white blossoms seemed from a distance to present an insurmountable barrier, and saw a river hardly wider than a street, on which swans sailed like sculptures of ice. There was a pavilion there, and beside it three boats, each shaped like the wide flower of the nenuphar. Their interiors were lined with the thickest silk brocade, and when I stepped into one I found that they exuded the odor of spices.
"Wonderful," Jolenta said. "They won't mind if we take one, will they? Or if they do, I'll be brought before someone important, just as it is in the play, and when he sees me he'll never let me leave. I'll make Dr. Talos stay with me, and you if you want. They'll have some use for you." I told her I would have to continue my journey north and lifted her into the boat, putting my arm about a waist quite as slender as Dorcas's.
She lay down at once upon the cushions, where the uplifted petals gave her perfect complexion shade. It made me think of Agia, laughing in the sun as we descended the Adamnian Steps and boasting of the wide-brimmed hat she would wear next year. Agia had no feature that was not inferior to Jolenta's; she had been hardly taller than Dorcas, with hips over-wide and breasts that would have seemed meager beside Jolenta's overflowing plenitude; her long, brown eyes and high cheekbones were more expressive of shrewdness and determination than passion and surrender. Yet Agia had engendered a healthy rut in me. Her laughter, when it came, was often tinged with spite; but it was real laughter. She had sweated with her heat; Jolenta's desire was no more than the desire to be desired, so that I wished, not to comfort her loneliness as I had wished to comfort Valeria's, nor to find expression for an aching love like the love I had felt for Thecla, nor to protect her as I wished to protect Dorcas; but to shame and punish her, to destroy her self-possession, to fill her eyes with tears and tear her hair as one burns the hair of corpses to torment the ghosts that have fled them. She had boasted that she made tribadists of women. She came near to making an algophilist of me.
"This is my last performance, I know. I feel it. The audience is sure to hold someone . . ." She yawned and stretched. It appeared so certain her straining bodice would be unable to contain her that I averted my eyes. When I looked again, she was sleeping.
A slender oar trailed behind the boat. I took it and found that despite the circularity of the hull above the water, there was a keel below. In the center of the river the current ran strongly enough that I needed only to steer our slow progress along a series of gracefully sweeping meanders. Just as the hooded servant and I had passed unseen through suites and alcoves and arcades when he had escorted me along the hidden ways of the Second House, so now the sleeping Jolenta and I passed without noise or effort, almost completely unobserved, through leagues of garden. Couples lay on the soft grass beneath the trees and in the more refined comfort of summerhouses and seemed to think our craft hardly more than a decoration sent idly downstream for their delectation, or if they saw my head above the curved petals assumed us intent upon our own affairs. Lone philosophers meditated on rustic seats, and parties, not invariably erotic, proceeded undisturbed in clerestories and arboriums.
Eventually I came to resent Jolenta's sleep. I abandoned the oar and knelt beside her on the cushions. There was a purity in her sleeping face, however artificial, that I had never observed when she was awake. I kissed her, and her large eyes, hardly open, seemed almost Agia's long eyes, as her red-gold hair appeared almost brown. I loosened her clothing. She seemed half drugged, whether by some soporific in the heaped cushions or merely by the fatigue induced by our walk in the open and the burden of so great a quantity of voluptuous flesh. I freed her breasts, each nearly as large as her own head, and those wide thighs, which seemed to hold a new-hatched chick between them. When we returned, everyone knew where we had been, though I doubt that Baldanders cared. Dorcas wept in private, vanishing for a time only to emerge with
inflamed eyes and a heroine's smile. Dr. Talos, I think, was simultaneously enraged and delighted. I received the impression (which I hold to this day) that he had never enjoyed Jolenta, and that it was only to him, of all the men of Urth, that she would have given herself entirely willingly.
We spent the watches that remained before nightfall in listening to Dr. Talos chaffer with various officials of the House Absolute, and in rehearsal. Since I have already said something of what it was to act in Dr. Talos's play, I propose to give an approximation of the text here—not as it existed on the fragments of soiled paper we passed from hand to hand that afternoon, which often contained no more than hints for improvisations, but as it might have been recorded by some diligent clerk in the audience; and as it was, in fact, recorded by the demonic witness who dwells behind my eyes. But first you must visualize our theater. Urth's laboring margin has climbed once more above the red disc; long-winged bats flit overhead, and a green quarter moon hangs low in the eastern sky. Imagine the slightest of valleys, a thousand paces or more from lip to lip, set among the gentlest turf-covered rolling hills. There are doors in these hills, some no wider than the entrance to an ordinary private room, some as wide as the doors of a basilica. These doors are open, and a mist-tinged light spills from them. Flagged paths wind down toward the tiny arch of our proscenium; they are dotted with men and women in the fantastic costumes of a masque—costumes drawn largely from remote ages, so that I, with no more than the smattering of history furnished me by Thecla and Master Palaemon, scarcely recognize one of them. Servants move among these masquers carrying trays loaded with cups and tumblers, heaped with delicious-smelling meats and pastries. Black seats of velvet and ebony, as delicate as crickets, face our stage, but many in the audience prefer to stand, and throughout our performance the spectators come and go without interruption, many remaining to hear no more than a dozen lines. Hylas sing in the trees, the nightingales trill, and atop the hills the walking statues move slowly through many poses. All the parts in the play are taken by Dr. Talos, Baldanders, Dorcas, Jolenta, or me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - DR. TALOS'S PLAY, ESCHATOLOGY AND GENESIS
Being a dramatization (as he claimed) of certain parts of the lost Book of the New Sun
Persons in the Play:
Gabriel
The Giant Nod
Meschia, the First Man
Meschiane, the First Woman
Jahi
The Autarch
The Contessa
Her Maid
Two Soldiers
A Statue
A Prophet
The Generalissimo
Two Demons (disguised)
The Inquisitor
His Familiar
Angelic Beings
The New Sun
The Old Sun
The Moon
The back of the stage is dark.
GABRIEL appears bathed in golden light and carrying a crystal clarion.
GABRIEL: Greetings. I have come to set the scene for you—after all, that is my function. It is the night of the last day, and the night before the first. The Old Sun has set. He will appear in the sky no more. Tomorrow the New Sun will rise, and my siblings and I will greet him. Tonight . . . tonight no one knows. Everyone sleeps.
Footsteps, heavy and slow. Enter NOD.
GABRIEL: Omniscience! Defend your servant!
NOD: Do you serve him? So do we Nephilim. I will not harm you, then, unless he suggests it.
GABRIEL: You are of his household? How does he communicate with you?
NOD: To tell the truth, he doesn't. I'm forced to guess at what he wishes me to do.
GABRIEL: I was afraid of that.
NOD: Have you seen Meschia's son?
GABRIEL: Have I seen him? Why, you great ninny, he isn't even born yet. What do you want with him?
NOD: He is to come and dwell with me, in my land east of this garden. I will give him one of my daughters to wife.
GABRIEL: You have the wrong creation, my friend—you're fifty million years too late.
NOD: (Nods slowly, not understanding.) If you should see him—
Enter MESCHIA and MESCHIANE, with JAHI following. All are naked, but JAHI wears jewelry.
MESCHIA: What a lovely place! Delightful! Flowers, fountains, and statues—isn't it wonderful?
MESCHIANE: (Timidly.) I saw a tame tiger with fangs longer than my hand. What shall we call him?
MESCHIA: Whatever he wants. (To GABRIEL:) Who owns this beautiful spot?
GABRIEL: The Autarch.
MESCHIA: And he permits us to live here. That's very gracious of him.
GABRIEL: Not exactly. There's someone following you, my friend. Do you know it?
MESCHIA: (Not looking.) There's something behind you too.
GABRIEL: (Flourishing the clarion that is his badge of office.) Yes, He is behind me!
MESCHIA: Close, too. If you're going to blow that horn to call help, you'd better do it now.
GABRIEL: Why, how perceptive of you. But the time is not quite ripe.
The golden light fades, and GABRIEL vanishes from the stage. NOD remains motionless, leaning on his club.
MESCHIANE: I'll start a fire, and you had better begin to build us a house. It must rain often here—see how green the grass is.
MESCHIA: (Examining NOD.) Why, it's only a statue. No wonder he wasn't afraid of it.
MESCHIANE: It might come to life. I heard something once about raising sons from stones.
MESCHIA: Once! Why you were only born just now. Yesterday, I think.
MESCHIANE: Yesterday! I don't remember it . . . I'm such a child, Meschia. I don't remember anything until I walked out into the light and saw you talking to a sunbeam.
MESCHIA: That wasn't a sunbeam! It was . . . to tell the truth, I haven't thought of a name for what it was yet.
MESCHIANE: I fell in love with you then.
Enter the AUTARCH.
AUTARCH: Who are you?
MESCHIA: As far as that goes, who are you?
AUTARCH: The owner of this garden.
MESCHIA bows, and MESCHIANE curtsies, though she has no skirt to hold.
MESCHIA: We were speaking to one of your servants only a moment ago. Now that I come to think of it, I am astonished at how much he resembled your august Self. Save that he was . . . ah . . .
AUTARCH: Younger?
MESCHIA: In appearance, at least.
AUTARCH: Well, it is inevitable, I suppose. Not that I am attempting to excuse it now. But I was young, and though it would be better to confine oneself to women nearer one's own station, still there are times—as you would understand, young man, if you had ever been in my position—when a little maid or country girl, who can be wooed with a handful of silver or a bolt of velvet, and will not demand, at the most inconvenient moment, the death of some rival or an ambassadorship for her husband . . . Well, when a little person like that becomes a most enticing proposition.
While the AUTARCH has been speaking, JAHI has been creeping up behind MESCHIA. Now she lays a hand on his shoulder.
JAHI: Now you see that he, whom you have esteemed your divinity, would countenance and advise all I have proposed of you. Before the New Sun rises, let us make a new beginning.
AUTARCH: Here's a lovely creature. How is it, child, that I see the bright flames of candles reflected in each eye, while your sister there still puffs cold tinder?
JAHI: She is no sister of mine!
AUTARCH: Your adversary then. But come with me. I will give these two my leave to camp here, and you shall wear a rich gown this night, and your mouth shall run with wine, and that slender figure shall be rendered a shade less graceful, perhaps, by larks stuffed with almonds and candied figs.
JAHI: Go away, old man.
AUTARCH: What! Do you know who I am?
JAHI: I am the only one here who does. You are a ghost and less, a column of ashes upheld by the wind.
AUTARCH: I see, she is mad. What does she want you to do, friend?
MESCHIA: (Relieved.) You hold no resentment toward her? That is good of you.
AUTARCH: None at all! Why, a mad mistress should be a most interesting experience—I am looking forward to it, believe me, and there are few things to look forward to when you've seen and done all I have. She doesn't bite, does she? I mean, not hard?
MESCHIANE: She does, and her fangs run with venom.
JAHI springs forward to claw her.
MESCHIANE darts offstage, pursued.
AUTARCH: I shall have my piquenaires search the garden for them.
MESCHIA: Don't worry, they'll both be back soon. You'll see. Meanwhile I am, actually, glad to have a moment alone with you like this. There are some things I've been wanting to ask you.
AUTARCH: I grant no favors after six—that's a rule I've had to make to keep my sanity. I'm sure you understand.
MESCHIA: (Somewhat taken aback.) That's good to know. But I wasn't going to ask for something, really. Only for information, for divine wisdom.
AUTARCH: In that case, go ahead. But I warn you, you must pay a price. I mean to have that demented angel for my own tonight.
MESCHIA drops to his knees.
MESCHIA: There is something I have never understood. Why must I talk to you when you know my every thought? My first question was: Knowing her to be of that brood you have banished, should I not still do what she proposes? For she knows I know, and it is in my heart to believe that she puts forward right action in the thought that I will spurn it because it comes from her.
AUTARCH: (Aside.) He is mad too, I see, and because of my yellow robes thinks me divine. (To MESCHIA:) A little adultery never hurt any man. Unless of course it was his wife's.
MESCHIA: Then mine would hurt her? I—
Enter the CONTESSA and her MAID.