by Gene Wolfe
The old man cackled. “Why, you never looked better in your life!”
I asked, “How did they say he’d died?”
“Drowned! Pinian’s boat foundered up by Baiulo Island , that’s what I heard.”
“Does he have a wife?” When I saw the old man’s curious glance, I added, “I only met him last night when we were out drinking, and I’d like to drop him off someplace. He’s stowed a little more than’s good for him, I’m afraid.”
“No family. He’s boardin’ with Pinian. Pinian’s old woman takes it out of his pay.” He told me how to get there and how to recognize the house, which sounded squalid enough. “Not that I’d bring him to ‘em so early, with him shippin’ water. Pinian’ll beat the cake out of him, sure as scullin’.” He shook his head in wonder. “Why, everybody heard they’d fished out Zama’s remains and brought ‘em back with ‘em!”
Not knowing what else to say I told him, “You never know what to believe,” and then, moved by this wretched old man’s clear delight at finding a strong young man still alive, I put my hand upon his head and mumbled some set phrases about wishing him well in this life and the next. It was a blessing I had occasionally given as Autarch.
I had intended to do nothing at all, and yet the effect was extraordinary. When I took away my hand, it seemed that the years had covered him like dust, and unseen walls had fallen to let in the wind; his eyes opened so that they looked as big as dishes, and he fell to his knees.
When we were some distance away, I glanced back at him. He was kneeling there still and staring after us, but no longer an old man. Nor was he a young one, but simply a man in essence, a man freed of the gyre of time.
Though Zama did not speak, he put his arm about my shoulders. I put mine over his, and in that fashion we strolled up the street Burgundofara and I had taken the evening before and found her at breakfast with Hadelin in the public room of the Chowder Pot.
Chapter XXXII — To the Alcyone
THEY HAD expected neither of us — there were no extra places set at the table. I pulled up a chair for myself, and then (when he only stood and stared) another for Zama .
“We thought you were gone, sieur,” Hadelin said. His face, and hers, told plainly enough where Burgundofara had spent the night.
“I was,” I said, speaking to her and not to him. “But I see you got into our room all right to get your clothes.”
“I thought you were dead,” Burgundofara said. When I did not reply, she added, “I thought this man had killed you. The doorway was blocked up with stuff I had to push over, but the shutters had been broken open.”
“Anyway, sieur, you’re back.” Hadelin tried to sound cheerful and failed. “Still going downriver with us?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “When I’ve seen your craft.”
“Then you will be, sieur, I think.”
The innkeeper appeared, bowing and forcing himself to smile. I noticed he had a butcher knife thrust through his belt behind his leather apron.
“Fruit for me,” I told him. “Last night you said you had some. Bring some for this man too; we’ll see whether he eats it. Mate for both of us.”
“Immediately, sieur.”
“After I’ve eaten, you and I can go up to my room. It’s been damaged, and we’ll have to decide by how much.”
“That won’t be necessary, sieur. A trifle! Perhaps we can agree upon an orichalk as a token payment?” He tried to rub his hands in the way such people often do, but their tremors made the gesture ridiculous.
“Five, I should think, or ten. A broken door, a damaged wall, and a broken bed — you and I shall go up and make a reckoning.”
His lips were trembling too, and suddenly it was no longer pleasant to terrify this little man who had come with his lantern and his stick when he heard one of his guests attacked. I said, “You shouldn’t drink so much,” and touched his hands.
He smiled, chirped, “Thank you, sieur! Fruit, yes, sieur!” and trotted away.
It was all tropical, as I had half expected: plantains, oranges, mangoes, and bananas brought overland to the upper river by trains of sumpters and shipped south. There were no apples and no grapes. I borrowed the knife that had stabbed Zama to peel a mango, and we ate in silence. After a time Zama ate too, which I thought a good sign.
“Something more, sieur?” the innkeeper asked at my elbow. “We’ve plenty.”
I shook my head.
“Then perhaps…?” He nodded toward the stair, and I rose, motioning for the others to remain where they were.
Burgundofara said, “You should have kept him frightened. It would have been cheaper.” The innkeeper shot her a glance of raw hatred.
His inn, which had looked small enough the night before when I had been tired and it was wrapped in darkness, I saw to be tiny now, four rooms on our floor, and four more, I suppose, on the floor above. The room itself, which had seemed capacious enough when I lay upon the torn mattress listening to Zama move about, was hardly larger than the cabin Burgundofara and I had shared on the tender. Zama’s ax, old and worn and intended for wood, stood in one corner.
“I didn’t want you to come so I could get money from you, sieur,” the innkeeper told me. “Not for this or anything. Not any time.”
I looked about at the destruction. “But you’ll have it.”
“Then I’ll give it away. There’s many a poor man in Os these days.”
“I imagine so.” I was not really listening to what he said or to what I said myself, but examining the shutters; it was to see them that I had insisted on coming upstairs. Burgundofara had mentioned that they had been broken, and she was right. The wood had split away from the screws that had held the bolt. I recalled bolting them and later opening them. When I retraced my actions in memory, I found that I had merely touched them and they had flown open.
“It would be wrong, sieur, for me to take anything after what you’ve brought me. Why, the Chowder Pot will be famous forever all up and down the river.” His eyes stared off into some heaven of notoriety invisible to me. “Not that we’re not known already — the best inn in Os. But some’ll come and stay here just to see this.” Inspiration seized him. “I won’t have it fixed, not nothing! I’ll leave it just like it is!”
I said, “Charge them to come in.”
“Yes, sieur, you have it. Not patrons, to be sure. But I’ll charge the others, yes indeed!”
I was about to order him to do no such thing, to have the damage repaired instead; but when I had opened my mouth to speak, I shut it again. Was it to snatch away this man’s good fortune — if good fortune it was — that I had returned to Urth? He loved me now as a father loves a son he admires without understanding. What right had I to harm him?
“My patrons were talking last night. I don’t suppose, sieur, you know what happened after you brought poor Zama back?”
“Tell me,” I said.
When we were downstairs again, I insisted on paying him, though he did not want to accept the money. “Dinner last night for the woman and me. Lodging for Zama and me. Two orichalks for the door, two for the wall, two for the bed, two for the shutters. Breakfast for Zama and me this morning. Put the woman’s lodging and breakfast to Captain Hadelin’s score and see what mine comes to.”
He did, writing out a full list on a scrap of brown paper with a sputtering and much chewed quill, then counting out neat stacks of silver, copper, and brass for me. I asked whether he was sure I had so much due.
“It’s the same prices for everybody here, sieur. We don’t charge by what a man has, but by what he’s had — though I don’t like charging you at all.”
Hadelin’s bill was settled with much less calculation, and the four of us left. Of all the inns at which I have stayed, I think I most regret leaving the Chowder Pot, with its good food and drink, and its company of honest rivermen. Often I have dreamed of going back, and perhaps sometime I shall. Certainly more guests came to our aid when Zama broke our door than there was any reas
on to expect, and I would like to think that one or even several of them were myself. Indeed it sometimes seems to me that I caught a glimpse of my own face in the candlelight that night.
However that may be, I had no thought of it as we stepped out into the morning-fresh street. The first hush of dawn was past, and carts rumbled along its ruts; women with their heads wrapped in kerchiefs paused on their way to market to stare at us. A flier like a great locust thrummed overhead; I watched it until it was out of sight, feeling the ghost of the strange wind blown from the pentadactyls that had attacked our cavalry at Orithyia.
“You don’t see many anymore, sieur,” Hadelin remarked with a gruffness I had not yet learned to recognize as deference. “Most won’t fly now.”
I confessed I had never seen any like that at all.
We turned a corner and had a fine view down the hill: the dark stone quay and the ships and boats moored there, and broad Gyoll beyond, its water glittering in the sun and its farther bank lost behind shining mist. “We must be well below Thrax,” I said to Burgundofara, confusing her for a moment with Gunnie, to whom I had told something of Thrax.
She turned, smiling, and attempted to take my arm. Hadelin said, “A good week, unless the wind’s with you all the way. Safe here. Surprised you know of a country place like that.”
By the time we reached the quay, a crowd trailed after us, keeping well back for the most part but whispering and pointing at Zama and me. Burgundofara tried to drive them off, and when she failed appealed to me to do it.
“Why?” I said. “We’ll sail soon enough.”
An old woman cried out to Zama and rushed up to embrace him. He smiled, and it was clear she meant no harm. A moment later I saw him nod when she begged to know if he was all right, and I asked whether she was his grandmother.
She made a countrified curtsy. “Oh, no, sieur. But I knew her and all the children in the old days. When I heard Zama was dead, I felt like a piece of me’d died with him.”
“So it had,” I told her.
Sailors came to take our sarcins, and I realized I had been watching Zama and the old woman so intently I had never spared a glance for Hadelin’s vessel. She was a xebec and looked handy enough — I have always been lucky in my ships. Already aboard, Hadelin motioned to us.
The old woman clung to Zama , tears rolling down her cheeks. As I watched, he wiped one away and said, “Don’t cry, Mafalda.” It was the only time he spoke.
The autochthons say that their cattle can speak but do not, knowing that to speak is to call up demons, all our words being only curses in the tongue of the empyrean. Zama’s seemed so in fact. The crowd parted as waves separate for the terrible jaws of a kronosaur, and Ceryx advanced through it.
His iron-shod staff was topped with a rotting human head, his lean frame draped in raw manskin; but when I saw his eyes I wondered that he bothered with such trumpery, as one wonders to see a lovely woman decked with glass beads and gowned in false silk. I had not known him so great a mage.
Impelled by the training of my boyhood, I took the knife Burgundofara put into my hand and saluted him before the Increate should judge between us, the flat of the blade before my face.
No doubt he thought I meant to kill him, as Burgundofara was demanding. He spoke into his left hand and made ready to cast the poisoned spell.
Zama changed. Not slowly, as such things occur in tales, but with a suddenness more frightful he was again the dead man who had burst into our room. There was a cry from the crowd, like the shriek of a troop of apes.
Ceryx would have fled, but they closed before him like a wall. Perhaps someone held him, or obstructed him intentionally; I do not know. In an instant Zama was upon him, and I heard his neck break as a bone snaps in the jaws of a dog.
For a breath the two lay together, the dead man on the dead man; then Zama rose, living once more and now alive fully, or so it appeared. I watched him recognize the old woman and me, and his lips parted. Half a dozen blades pierced him before he could speak.
By the time I reached him, he was less a man than a gobbet of bleeding flesh. Blood spurted in weakening streams from his throat; no doubt his heart still beat under its welter of blood, though his chest had been opened with a billhook. I stood over him and tried to call him to life yet again. The eyes of the head on Ceryx’s fallen staff rolled in their putrid sockets to stare at me; sickened, I turned away, wondering to find myself, a torturer, grown so cruel. Someone took my hand and led me toward the ship. As we went up the shaky gangplank, I discovered it was Burgundofara.
Hadelin received us among hurrying sailors. “They got him that time, sieur. Last night we were all afraid to strike first. Daylight makes a difference.”
I shook my head. “They killed him because he was no longer dangerous to them, Captain.”
Burgundofara whispered, “He ought to lie down. It takes a great deal out of him.”
Hadelin pointed to a door under the sun deck. “If you’ll go below, sieur. I’ll show you the cabin. It’s not big, but—”
I shook my head again. There were benches on either side of the door, and I asked to rest there. Burgundofara went to look at the cabin while I sat trying to wipe the image of Zama’s face from my eyes and watching the crew make ready to cast off. One of the sun-browned rivermen seemed familiar; but I, who can forget nothing, sometimes have difficulty in bringing the quarry to bay in a memory that grows ever more vast.
Chapter XXXIII — Aboard the Alcyone
SHE WAS a xebec, low in the water and narrow at the waist. Her foremast carried an immense lateen sail, her pole mainmast three square sails that could be dropped to the main deck for reefing, and her mizzen a gaffsail, with a square topsail above it. Her gaffsail boom was lengthened by a flagstaff, so that on festive occasions (and such it appeared Hadelin considered our departure to be) an overwrought banner could be hung over the water. Flags of like design, representing no nation on Urth so far as I knew, flapped from the tops.
In truth, there is something irresistibly festive about a sailing, provided it takes place in daylight and good weather. At every moment it seemed to me that we were about to depart, and at every moment my heart grew lighter. I felt it was wrong to be happy, that I should be miserable and exhausted, as indeed I had been when I looked down at poor Zama’s body and for some time after. Yet I could not continue so. I pulled up the hood of my cloak as I had once drawn up the hood of my guild cloak when I strode smiling down the Water Way to exile, and although this cloak (which I had taken from my stateroom on Tzadkiel’s ship upon a morning that now seemed as remote as the first dawn of Urth) was fuligin purely by chance, I smiled once more at the realization that the Water Way stretched along this very river and the water lapping our sides must soon wash its dark curbs.
Afraid Burgundofara might return or that some sailor would glimpse my face, I climbed the few steps to the quarterdeck and discovered we had put out while I sat alone with my thoughts. Os was already far behind us, and would have been out of sight had not the atmosphere been as clear as hyalite. Its wretched lanes and vicious people I knew well enough; but the sparkling morning air made its staggering wall and tumbledown towers seem those of just such an enchanted town as I had seen in Thecla’s brown book. I remembered the story, of course, as I remember everything; and I began to tell it to myself, leaning over the railing and whispering the words as I watched the fading town, lulled by the easy rocking of our vessel, which heeled scarcely at all under the slightest of breezes.
THE TALE OF THE TOWN THAT FORGOT FAUNA
Long ago, when the plow was new, nine men journeyed up a river in search of a site upon which to establish a new city . After many a day of weary rowing through mere wilderness, they came upon a place where an old woman had built a hut of sticks and planted a garden.
There they beached their boat, for the supplies they had carried with them were gone, and for many days they had eaten only such fish as they could catch in the river and drunk only river water. The ol
d woman, whose name was Fauna, gave them mead and ripe melons, beans white, black, and red; carrots and turnips; cucumbers as thick as your arm; and apples, cherries, and apricots.
That night they slept before her fire; and in the morning, as they walked over the land eating its grapes and strawberries, they saw that everything needed to build a great city was there, where stone could be floated down from the mountains upon rafts of logs, where there was good water in abundance and the rich soil engendered a green birth from every seed.
Then they held a council. Some urged that they should kill the old woman. Others, more merciful, that they should only drive her away. Still others proposed that they should trick her by this means or that.
But their leader was a pious man who said, “If we do any of these evil things, you may be sure the Increate will not permit it to pass without notice, for she has welcomed us and given us of all she possesses except her land. Let us offer our money for that. It may be she will accept it, not knowing the value of what she has.”
So they polished each brass or copper bit, put them into a bag, and offered it to the old woman. But she refused, for she loved her home.
“Let her be tied, and laid into one of her own tubs,” some said. “Then we will only have to push the tub into the current, and we will be rid of her; and which of us will have her blood upon his hands?”
Their leader shook his head. “Surely her ghost would haunt our new town,” he told them. And so they added their silver to the money in the sack and offered it again; but the old woman refused as before.
“She is old,” one said, “and in the course of nature she must die soon. I will remain here to care for her while you return to your families. When she is dead I will return also, bearing the news.”
At this the leader shook his head, for he saw murder in the speaker’s eyes; and at last they added their gold (which was not much) to the money already in the bag and offered that to the old woman as well. But she, who loved her home, refused just as before.
