by Gene Wolfe
“Yes,” I said. “The Chatelaine has eaten bread before, surely?”
“Not like this.” She picked the meager slice up and tore it with her teeth, quickly and cleanly. “It isn’t bad, though. You say they’ll bring me better food if I ask for it?”
“I think so, Chatelaine.”
“Thecla. I asked for books—two days ago when I came. But I haven’t got them.”
“I have them,” I told her. “Right here.” I ran back to Drotte’s table and got them, and passed the smallest through the slot.
“Oh, wonderful! Are there others?”
“Three more.” The brown book went through the slot as well, but the other two, the green book and the folio volume with arms on its cover, were too wide. “Drotte will open your door later and give them to you,” I said. “Can’t you? It’s terrible to look through this and see them, and not be able to touch them.”
“I’m not even supposed to feed you. Drotte should do it.”
“But you did. Besides, you brought them. Weren’t you supposed to give them to me?”
I could argue only weakly, knowing she was right in principle. The rule against apprentices working in the oubliette was intended to prevent escapes; and I knew that tall though she was, this slender woman could never overpower me, and that should she do so she would have no chance of making her way out without being challenged. I went to the door of the cell where Drotte still labored over the client who had tried to take her own life, and retumed with his keys. Standing before her, with her own cell door closed and locked behind me, I found myself unable to speak. I put the books on her table beside the candlestand and her food pan and carafe of water; there was hardly room for them. When it was done I stood waiting, knowing I should leave and yet unable to go. “Won’t you sit down?”
I sat on her bed, leaving her the chair.
“If this were my suite in the House Absolute, I could offer you better comfort.
Unfortunately, you never called while I was there.”
I shook my head.
“Here I have no refreshment to offer you but this. Do you like lentils?”
“I won’t eat that, Chatelaine. I’ll have my own supper soon, and there’s hardly enough for you.”
“True.” She picked up a leek, and then as if she did not know what else to do with it dropped it down her throat like a mountebank swallowing a viper. “What will you have?”
“Leeks and lentils, bread and mutton.”
“Ah, the torturers get mutton—that’s the difference. What’s your name, Master Torturer?”
“Severian. It won’t help, Chatelaine. It won’t make any difference.”
She smiled. “What won’t?”
“Making friends with me. I couldn’t give you your freedom. And I wouldn’t—not if I had no friend but you in all the world.”
“I didn’t think you could, Severian.”
“Then why do you bother to talk to me?”
She sighed, and all the gladness went out of her face, as the stinlight leaves the stone where a beggar seeks to warm himself. “Who else have I to talk to, Severian? It may be that I will talk to you for a time, for a few days or a few weeks, and die. I know what you’re thinking—that if I were back in my suite I would never spare a glance for you. But you’re wrong. One can’t talk to everyone because there are so many everyones, but the day before I was taken I talked for some time with the man who held my mount. I spoke to him because I had to wait, you see, and then he said something that interested me.”
“You won’t see me again. Drotte will bring your food.”
“And not you? Ask him if he will let you do it.” She took my hands in hers, and they were like ice.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Do. Do try. Tell him I want better meals than this, and you to serve me—wait, I’ll ask him myself. To whom does he answer?”
“Master Gurloes.”
“I’ll tell the other—is it Drotte?—that I want to speak to him. You’re right, they’ll have to do it. The Autarch might release me—they don’t know.” Her eyes flashed.
“I’ll tell Drotte you want to see him when he’s not busy,” I said, and stood up.
“Wait. Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?”
“I know why you’re here,” I said as I swung back the door. “To be tortured, eventually, like the others.” It was a cruel thing to say, and I said it without reflection as young men do, only because it was what was in my mind. Yet it was true, and I was glad in some way, as I tumed the key in the lock, that I had said it.
We had had exultants for clients often before. Most, when they arrived, had some understanding of their situation, as the Chatelaine Thecla did now. But when a few days had passed and they were not put to torment, their hope cast down their reason and they began to talk of release—how friends and family would maneuver to gain their freedom, and of what they would do when they were free. One would withdraw to his estates and trouble the Autarch’s court no more. Another would volunteer to lead a muster of lansquenets in the north. Then the journeymen on duty in the oubliette would hear tales of hunting dogs and remote heaths, and country games, unknown elsewhere, played beneath immemorial trees. The women were more realistic for the most part, but even they in time spoke of highly placed lovers (cast aside now for months or years) who would never abandon them, and then of bearing children or adopting waifs. One knew when these never-to-be-bom children were given names that clothing would not be far behind: a new wardrobe on their release, the old clothes to be burned; they talked of colors, of inventing new fashions and reviving old ones. At last the time would come, to men and women alike, when instead of a journeyman with food, Master Gurloes would appear trailing three or four journeymen and perhaps an examiner and a fulgurator. I wanted to preserve the Chatelaine Thecla from such hopes if I could. I hung Drotte’s keys on their accustomed nail in the wall, and when I passed the cell in which he was now swabbing blood from the floor told him that the chatelaine desired to speak with him.
On the next day but one, I was summoned to Master Gurloes. I had expected to stand, as we apprentices usually did, with hands behind back before his table; but he told me to sit, and removing his gold-traced mask, leaned toward me in a way that implied a common cause and friendly footing. “A week ago, or a little less, I sent you to the archivist,” he said.
I nodded.
“When you brought the books, I take it you delivered them to the client yourself. Is that right?”
I explained what had happened.
“Nothing wrong there. I don’t want you to think I’m going to order extra fatigues for what you did, much less have you bent over a chair. You’re nearly a joumeyman yourself already—when I was your age, they had me cranking the alternator. The thing is, you see, Severian, the client is highly placed.” His voice sank to a rough whisper. “Quite highly connected.” I said that I understood that.
“Not just an armiger family. High blood.” He turned, and after searching the disorderly shelves behind his chair produced a squat book. “Have you any notion how many exulted families there are? This lists only the ones that are still going. A compendium of the extinguished ones would take an encyclopedia, I suppose. I’ve extinguished a few of them myself.”
He laughed and I laughed with him.
“It gives about half a page to each. There are seven hundred and forty-six pages.”
I nodded to show I understoed.
“Most of them have nobody at court—can’t afford it, or are afraid of it. Those are the small ones. The greater families must: the Autarch wants a concubine he can lay hands on if they start misbehaving. Now the Autarch can’t play quadrille with five hundred women. There are maybe twenty. The rest talk to each other, and dance, and don’t see him closer than a chain off once in a month.” I asked (trying to hold my voice steady) if the Autarch actually bedded these concubines.
Master Gurloes rolled his eyes and pulled at his jaw with one huge hand. �
�Well now, for decency’s sake they have these khaibits, what they call the shadow women, that are common girls that look like the chatelaines. I don’t know where they get them, but they’re supposed to stand in place of the others. Of course they’re not so tall.” He chuckled. “I said stand in place, but when they’re laying down the tallness probably doesn’t make much difference. They do say, though, that oftentimes it works the other way than it’s supposed to. Instead of those shadow girls doing duty for their mistresses, the mistresses do it for them. But the present Autarch, whose every deed, I may say, is sweeter than honey in the mouths of this honorable guild and don’t you forget it—in his case, I may say, from what I understand it is more than somewhat doubtful if he has the pleasure of any of them.”
Relief flooded my heart. “I never knew that. It’s very interesting, Master.” Master Gurloes inclined his head to acknowledge that it was indeed, and laced his fingers over his belly. “Someday you may have the ordering of the guild yourself. You’ll need to know these things. When I was your age—or a trifle younger, I suppose—I used to fancy I was of exulted blood. Some have been, you know.”
It struck me, and not for the first time, that Master Gurloes and Master Palaemon too must have known whence all the apprentices and younger journeymen had come, having approved their admissions originally. “Whether I am or no, I cannot say. I have the physique of a rider, I think, and I am somewhat over the average in height despite a hard boyhood. For it was harder, much harder, forty years ago, I’ll tell you.”
“So I have been told, Master.”
He sighed, the kind of wheezing noise a leather pillow sometimes makes when one sits on it. “But with the passage of time I have come to understand that the Increate, in choosing for me a career in our guild, was acting for my benefit. Doubtless I had acquired merit in a previous life, as I hope I have in this one.”
Master Gurloes fell silent, looking (it seemed to me) at the jumble of papers on his table, the instructions of jurists and the dossiers of clients. At last, when I was about to ask if he had anything further to tell me, he said, “In all my years, I have never known of a member of the guild put to torment. Of them, several hundred, I suppose.”
I ventured the commonplace saying that it was better to be a toad hidden under a stone than a butterfly crushed beneath it.
“We of the guild are more than toads, I think. But I should have added that though I have seen five hundred or more exultants in our cells, I have never, until now, had charge of a member of that inner circle of concubines closest to the Autarch.”
“The Chatelaine Thecla belonged to it? You implied that a mcment ago, Master.” He nodded gloomily. “It wouldn’t be so bad if she were to be put to torment at once, but that isn’t to be. It may be years. It may be never.”
“You believe she may be released, Master?”
“She’s a pawn in the Autarch’s game with Vodalus—even I know that much. Her sister, the Chatelaine Thea, has fled the House Absolute to become his leman. They will bargain with Thecla for a time at least, and while they do, we must give her good fare. Yet not too good.”
“I see,” I said. I was acutely uncomfortable not knowing what the Chatelaine Thecla had told Drotte, and what Drotte had told Master Gurloes. “She’s asked for better food, and I’ve made arrangements to supply it. She’s asked for company as well, and when we told her visitors would not be permitted, she urged that one of us, at least, should keep her company sometimes.” Master Gurloes paused to wipe his shining face with the edge of his cloak. I said, “I understand.” I was fairly certain that I indeed understood what was to come next.
“Because she had seen your face, she asked for you. I told her you’ll sit with her while she eats. I don’t ask your agreement—not only because you’re subject to my instructions, but because I know you’re loyal. What I do ask is that you be careful not to displease her, and not to please her too much.”
“I will do my best.” I was surprised to hear my own steady voice. Master Gurloes smiled as if I had eased him. “You’ve a good head, Severian, though it’s a young one yet. Have you been with a woman?” When we apprentices talked, it was the custom to invent fables on this topic, but I was not among apprentices now, and I shook my head. “You’ve never been to the witches? That may be for the best. They supplied my own instruction in the warm commerce, but I’m not sure I’d send them another such as I was. It’s likely, though, that the Chatelaine wants her bed warmed. You’re not to do it for her. Her pregnancy would be no ordinary one—it might force a delay in her torment and bring disgrace on the guild. You follow me?” I nodded.
“Boys your age are troubled. I’ll have somebody take you where such ills are speedily cured.”
“As you wish, Master.”
“What? You don’t thank me?”
“Thank you, Master,” I said.
Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man’s idea of simplicity. Just as a courtier forms himself into something brilliant and involved, midway between a dancing master and a diplomacist, with a touch of assassin if needed, so Master Gurloes had shaped himself to be the dull creature a pursuivant or bailiff expected to see when he summoned the head of our guild, and that is the only thing a real torturer cannot be. The strain showed; though every part of Gurloes was as it should have been, none of the parts fit. He drank heavily and suffered from nightmares, but he had the nightmares when he had been drinking, as if the wine, instead of bolting the doors of his mind, threw them open and left him staggering about in the last hours of the night, trying to catch a glimpse of a sun that had not yet appeared, a sun that would banish the phantoms from his big cabin and permit him to dress and send the journeymen to their business. Sometimes he went to the top of our tower, above the guns, and waited there talking to himself, peering through glass said to be harder than flint for the first beams. He was the only one in our guild—Master Palaemon not excepted—who was unafraid of the energies there and the unseen mouths that spoke sometimes to human beings and sometimes to other mouths in other towers and keeps. He loved music, but he thumped the arm of his chair to it and tapped his foot, and did so most vigorously to the kind he liked best, whose rhythms were too subtle for any regular cadence. He ate too much and too seldom, read when he thought no one knew of it, and visited certain of our clients, including one on the third level, to talk of things none of us eaves-dropping in the corridor outside could understand. His eyes were refulgent, brighter than any woman’s. He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau. I cannot well tell you how bad he looked when I returned to the Citadel recently, how bad he looks now.
8. THE CONVERSATIONALIST
Next day, for the first time, I carried Thecla’s supper to her. For a watch I remained with her, frequently observed through the slot in the cell door by Drotte. We played word games, at which she was far better than I, and after a while talked of those things those who have returned are said to say lie beyond death, she recounting what she had read in the smallest of the books I had brought her—not only the accepted views of the hierophants, but various eccentric and heretic theories.
“When I am free,” she said, “I shall found my own sect. I will tell everyone that its wisdom was revealed to me during my sojourn among the torturers. They’ll listen to that.”
I asked what her teachings would be.
“That there is no agathodaemon or afterlife. That the mind is extinguished in death as in sleep, yet more so.”
“But who will you say revealed that to you?”
She shook her head, then rested her pointed chin upon one hand, a pose that showed off the graceful line of her neck admirably. “I haven’t decided yet. An angel of ice, perhaps. Or a ghost. Which do you think best?”
“Isn’t there a contradiction in that?”
“Precisely.” Her voice was rich with the pleasure the question gave her. “In that contradiction
will reside the appeal of this new belief. One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past—they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”
I said, “These things are too complex for me.”
“No they’re not. You’re as intelligent as most young men, I think. But I suppose you torturers have no religion. Do they make you swear to give it up?”
“Not at all. We’ve a celestial patroness and observances, just like any other guild.”
“We don’t,” she said. For a moment she seemed to brood on that. “Only the guilds do, you know, and the army, which is a kind of guild. We’d be better off, I think, if we did. Still all the days of feast and nights of vigil have become shows, opportunities to wear new dresses. Do you like this?” She stood and extended her arms to show the soiled gown.
“It’s very pretty,” I ventured. “The embroidery, and the way the little pearls are sewed on.”
“It’s the only thing I have here—what I was wearing when I was taken. It’s for dinner, really. After late afternoon and before early evening.” I said I was sure Master Gurloes would have others brought if she asked. “I already have, and he says he sent some people to the House Absolute to fetch them for me, but they were unable to find it, which means that the House Absolute is trying to pretend I don’t exist. Anyway, it’s possible all my clothes have been sent to our chateau in the north, or one of the villas. He’s going to have his secretary write them for me.”
“Do you know who he sent?” I asked. “The House Absolute must be nearly as big as our Citadel, and I would think it would be impossible for anyone to miss.”
“On the contrary, it’s quite easy. Since it can’t be seen, you can be there and never know it if you’re not lucky. Besides, with the roads closed, all they have to do is alert their spies to give a particular party incorrect direction, and they have spies everywhere.”
