The Land Across

by Gene Wolfe

  When Naala did not speak, the archbishop looked at me. “I once encountered an old woman who had been visited by an angel. You will not believe it.”

  “You’re right, Your Excellency. I don’t.”

  “I never saw it, for it had gone by the time I met her. This was when I was a young priest. But she talked of it and named it, and told me things it had told her that would unravel the tangles of certain theologians—if they could be persuaded to believe them.” The archbishop opened a little box on his desk and took out a key. For a few seconds he looked at it.

  He laid it down. “One thing she told me has remained with me to this day. She said that she was the only one who ever saw the angel. It was always in another room when visitors came. She would ask it where it had been, and it would explain that it had been in the attic, or in the spring house, or in the root cellar, or in the kitchen. Nevertheless, her visitors always commented favorably on her house. How bright and smiling all her rooms were, how clean everything was, how good the air smelled there.”

  It seemed like Naala was not going to say anything then, either. To fill in I said, “Why are you telling us this?”

  “It is not so for my city—for our city. There is a darkness now that the sun cannot drive out, and its air is close and fetid. It is possessed.”

  I nodded to show I understood.

  “I do not know how to exorcise a city. Neither does Papa Zenon. We must get closer. We must find the right room. Can you help us, young man?”

  I said, “I will if I can.”

  “I will not,” Naala told him. “I will not, because I do not believe you. We ask an explanation, and you give us a bogey tale.”

  The archbishop nodded as though he had expected it. “You want evidence, and I have no evidence. I have only this.”

  He picked up the key again and unlocked a drawer of his desk. For just a second I thought the thing he took out might be a dead tarantula. When he laid it on his desk, I saw it was somebody’s hand, dried and shriveled up.

  I heard Naala’s breath, a hiss like a snake’s.

  “One of my priests brought this to me yesterday,” the archbishop explained. “He told me the woman who had given it to him said she had found it. He did not say where. What do you think of it?”

  Naala picked it up. “It—the purple color.”

  “Those are tattoos.” The archbishop had taken a big magnifying glass from another drawer. “You will wish to read them, but you will find it difficult. They are old, and the ink has blurred. Some are blasphemous. I take it that will not trouble you.”

  Naala shook her head. I was surprised that she had even heard him.

  I asked, “Did you say you just got this yesterday, Your Excellency?”

  He nodded.

  “You seem to have gone over it pretty thoroughly.”

  He nodded again. “I did, this morning. It interests me, and I was looking at it when my secretary informed me that you would be here at three. You have not looked at it.”

  “Not very much, Your Excellency. I’ll have a look when Naala’s through with it.”

  She glanced up. “Who told you about tattoos?”

  “That the ink blurs? No one.” The archbishop smiled. “I happen to know something about them. The blurring takes place only very slowly, you understand. Years must pass. Decades.”

  “These are terribly dim.”

  “Yes, they are. If you desire to read them, you will require my lens. Would you like it?” He held it up, and passed it to Naala when she reached for it.

  I said, “That’s a woman’s hand.”

  “I agree, although we may both be wrong. There were traces of wax under the nails. Does that mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head. The nails were long, and some of them were broken or split.

  “Some superstitious people believe that the hand of a corpse can be made to reveal the location of treasure. There is a ceremony, dark invocations, and so on. Those vary with the magician. The key points are that the hand is laid on its back and candles of corpse fat are placed upon its fingers. Five candles. They are lit with more ceremony, of course. After that, the hand is said to point to the treasure. It’s nonsense, but the wax suggests that someone tried it.”

  “It doesn’t seem like corpse fat would make very good candles,” I said.

  “I agree, young man.” The archbishop was smiling a little. “What I found was wax, as I told you.”

  Naala laid the magnifying glass on his desk. “I must take this.” She seemed to hesitate. “I will require a bag for it. A bag or a box. Tell your secretary to bring me one.”

  There was a little bell on the desk. The archbishop picked it up and rang it. It was just a little glass bell, but for some reason I did not like the sound it made.

  “The hand will be returned to you when we are through with it,” Naala told him.

  “You are most gracious.” He looked quite happy.

  “A priest, you said. A priest gave it to you. You did not give us his name. It was Zenon!”

  The archbishop stopped smiling. “No, it was not.”

  “I must have the name, and it must be the correct one. We will investigate this, I think. It is with this priest that we begin. Give me his name.”

  “I will, if you wish it. You would seem to think the hand involved with your search.”

  Naala shrugged. “The black magicians you fear freed Rathaus. This I think. Why should your priest be given such a thing?”

  “One of his parishioners brought it to him, I believe. May I ask why you believe the Satanists are involved in your case?”

  I said, “I don’t think they are. Naala does, probably because a big doll with a face like Russ Rathaus’s was left in his bunk.”

  The archbishop’s eyes went wide, and he leaned forward.

  “I guess you know about the dolls. Only I don’t think Satanists made that one. Russ made dolls and sold them, on the outside.”

  “I see.” The archbishop leaned back, smiling. “I no longer wonder, madame, why the hand interests you. Or why the presence here of Papa Zenon does, for that matter. You wish the name of the priest who brought me the hand?”

  Naala nodded. “I do. The hand itself I also wish.”

  “You will have it. The priest is Papa Iason. His parish is Saint Isidore’s, near the canal. I trust that you will respect his person. He is a priest of God.”

  The secretary came in about then, and the archbishop asked him to find a stout box large enough to hold the hand. You could tell he was curious, but he did not ask any questions. He just hurried away.

  “I have cooperated fully with you,” the archbishop told Naala. “Will you concede that?”

  She nodded again, still looking at the hand.

  “That being the case, will you promise me that there will be no torture of Papa Iason?”

  “I cannot bind my superiors,” Naala told him.

  “I ask only that you bind yourself and this young man.”

  “You have cooperated with me,” Naala told him. “You say this, but I have no way of verifying it. You may be holding something back. I will now demonstrate my charity, which is very great. You have my word that if Papa Iason cooperates fully with me, I will not order him tortured. Papa Zenon is investigating for you? Investigating the bad magic?”

  The archbishop hesitated before he nodded.

  “I assumed, though you did not say it. My charity, the charity of the JAKA, is such that I give you, unasked, the same guarantee concerning him. If he cooperates, I will not order him tortured. You may rejoice.”

  The secretary came back with a wooden box big enough to hold the hand. There were pictures on it, carved and painted, that looked pretty old. As we left, I told Naala that Papa Zenon had been a good friend to me and I hoped she would really take it easy on him.

  She laughed. “We of the JAKA do not torture, but for us it is useful that others think we do. Your Papa Zenon is quite safe.”

  “That’s good,
” I said. “Where are we going now? To see this other priest?”

  “Of course no. We go to fetch the woman from prison, the Rosalee.”

  That surprised me so much I did not say anything more for a long time. But when we were back in the police car and it was turning and turning through the crooked streets and scaring horses with its flashing light, Naala told me, “We never torture unless torture is absolutely necessary.”

  12

  WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

  Naala did not want to take Rosalee in her prison uniform, so we stopped at a shop and bought a checkered cotton dress for her. Naala thought it would be too small and I thought it would be too big. As soon as each of us had said our piece, we both thought it would probably be about right. When Rosalee tried it on, it was a little loose. The way I figured I had won, but it would have been dumb for me to say so. Now when I think of Rosalee, it is always in that loose red-and-white dress.

  “We are going to take you to see a priest,” Naala told her. “This priest may know what happen to your husband. If he does, he may tell us. If not now, then later.”

  When I had interpreted that, Rosalee asked what we wanted her to do.

  “I want him to see you,” Naala told her. “That will be enough.”

  Just looking at Rosalee I knew she could not figure out what the game was. Neither could I, but I kept my mouth shut. Here I ought to get to Papa Iason and all that, but before I do I want to tell you how it was when we went out the gate.

  Naala was not very tall, but when she walked it was always fast, striding along with her skirt whipping around her legs. Strolling was not in her makeup. Most of the time that was all right with me. I have long legs and it was not much of a strain for me to keep up. Rosalee was small, and she had been standing at that cutting machine since early in the morning. She just about had to run to keep up, and she was gasping before we had gone a hundred yards.

  Then we got close to the gate, and I saw the fear hit her. She thought the guards were going to stop her, and probably punish her for not wearing prison clothes, that they were going to rip that little cotton dress right off of her, and beat her, too.

  I told Naala to slow down, but she only snorted. “For why? Because they must see my papers? These they saw when we came.”

  She had the right idea. The guards just saluted her and did not say a thing about Rosalee. I figure the warden had sent somebody to tell them what was up as soon as we left her office.

  When Rosalee stepped out of the gate, she could not believe it. Her eyes just shone, and you could see it in the way she held herself and everything else. Then Naala whistled and waved to our police car, which had not been parked in front because of the vegetable stands. We all piled into the backseat, Naala on one end and me on the other, with Rosalee in the middle. And I knew that she thought we were really taking her to JAKA headquarters or something like that. Naala told the driver about Saint Isidore’s, but I do not think Rosalee understood.

  Naala sent our police car away when we got to the church. You could have lost that church in a corner of the cathedral, but it looked pretty new, concrete block about as high as my waist and wood above that. The dull yellow paint was not all that new, but it had not started to flake off either.

  We went in there, but there was nobody there except two old ladies praying. So we went to the priest’s house, which looked older than his church, and a friendly lady about sixty told us he was in Demas’s having a meeting.

  We had gotten directions, so we found the canal and walked along it for about a mile. Demas’s was what we would probably call a bar and grill in America, a place where you could buy drinks and sandwiches, roasted garlic, and raw vegetable sticks. All that kind of stuff.

  It should not have taken me long to spot Papa Iason but it did, probably two minutes or a little more. There is a kind of man who goes straight from being a boy to being middle-aged. Generally he is heavy, and he starts losing his hair really early. That is what Papa Iason was like. His hair was about half gone and his face was red. I had been looking at the people who talked, and that was why it had taken me so long. He was a listener, just sitting there in his black suit sipping beer from a big mug and tapping his lips with a pencil. Later I was surprised how young he was.

  Naala spotted him about the same time I did. She pulled up a chair and sat down in the group, then motioned for us to do the same. There was only one empty chair left, so I let Rosalee have it and sat on the floor up front.

  They were talking about a sort of street fair they were going to put on. People would bring things they wanted to get rid of. They would be sold at the fair and the money would go to the church. Some other people would bring cider and cookies and things like that. They could give them away to attract customers or they could sell them. If they sold them, that money would have to go to the church, too. Some people were afraid these people would keep the money—after all, it was their cookies and their cider. So maybe somebody else should sell those, and they talked about that quite a while. Papa Iason wanted to trust them. He did not say that but you could tell from his face when a lady who felt the same way talked.

  Also, he kept looking at Naala out of the corner of his eye. I did not bother him and neither did Rosalee, but Naala did. Naala was holding the box on her lap, and he looked at that three or four times, too.

  After about half an hour he closed the meeting and asked the lady who had been taking notes to read what had been decided. She did and there was some arguing, but you could tell that three or four of them were getting pretty nervous about us and wanted to get out of there.

  When most of them had gone, Papa Iason said, “I believe it is to me you wish to speak.”

  Naala nodded.

  “Perhaps you would like some beer. I will order it for you.”

  “For me, no.” She turned to me. “Tell her she may have beer if she wishes it.”

  So I stood up and asked Rosalee, and she surprised me by saying yes. I told Naala that Rosalee and I would like some, and Papa Iason ordered.

  “My beer is given to me without charge,” he told Naala. “For your friends I will pay.”

  Naala said, “You know who I am.”

  “I believe I do. Yes.”

  “His Excellency sent someone with a message.”

  “Surely there can be no harm in that.”

  “In which case you know also why I have come.”

  “About the hand. It might be best not to speak of it loudly.”

  “I have not spoken of it all,” Naala said. “What can you tell me?”

  “You will wish to know whose hand it is. I do not know.”

  “What do you know? Let us talk of that. Who gave it to you?”

  “A woman I do not know.”

  “How convenient!” Naala leaned forward. “You saw her? You spoke with her?”

  “She came to the rectory. It was quite late—I had started to ready myself for bed. When she came in, she tried to give me something wrapped in a shawl. I thought it a foundling, so I told her she must sit down, that I would not take what she offered unless she did.”

  “You asked her name.”

  Papa Iason shook his head. “I did not. When someone brings a foundling, we never do.”

  I guess Naala thought he looked like he wanted to say something else, because she said, “Go on.”

  “If we were to ask names they would only lie, and the unhappy infants would be left on the doorstep in the cold. It is warmer now, but there are dogs. Strays.”

  “What did this woman look like?”

  “You are trying to find her,” Papa Iason said. “So am I. I will help you, and hope you help me.”

  “Before I decide, I must know more. Describe her.”

  “Quite young. Red hair, I think. She was wearing a black scarf over her head. What do women call those?”

  Naala waved the question to one side.

  “She had on that black scarf. At least, it looked black in our parlor. There was a l
ock of hair peeping out, and it seemed to be red. By electric light it is always hard to judge.”

  “Tall? Short?” Naala was getting irritated.

  “The height of most women, I would say. Her face was rather pretty, but not striking.”

  Our beer came, and since there were a lot of empty chairs now, I took the one next to Rosalee. She had time for one sip of beer before Naala made her stand up.

  “Look at this woman,” Naala said. “Was the woman who brought the hand taller?”

  Papa Iason asked, “Do you have it in that box?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “A little taller, yes. Not much.”

  “Did you notice her shoes?”

  Papa Iason shook his head.

  “Her dress? What was she wearing?”

  “A plain black dress.”

  “Black? Are you sure?”

  Papa Iason shook his head again. “Some dark color. It could have been blue or green.”

  “Rings on her fingers?”

  “I did not notice any.”

  “Was she beautiful?”

  That took him by surprise. After a couple of seconds he said, “I am a priest.”

  “You are a priest and I am an operator. If you ask me a question while I kneel in the confessional, I will answer you honestly. You must answer me honestly when I do my duty.”

  Papa Iason seemed to be trying to find words.

  “See this woman.” Naala caught Rosalee’s chin on the point of her finger and turned her head to show Papa Iason her profile. “Was she as good-looking as this?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do not be gallant. Was she?”

  “She was pretty, I think, which I told you before. Perhaps very pretty if she had smiled. This woman you bring is beautiful. Who is she?”

  “My prisoner, although I will free her if she assists me. You made the woman who carried something come inside. What did she say?”

  “She told me she had a bad thing. I must take it, but I must be careful with it. I told her she ought to take it to the police. She said they would arrest her and it would do no good. She laid it on the hearth to unwrap.” Papa Iason paused. “It was a warm night.”