The Claw of the Conciliator

by Gene Wolfe

Page 2

 

  He paused to step back and examine me more carefully, nodding to himself as though greatly impressed. "They become you. I must say, youve a fine figure. A handsome face too, save perhaps for a bit too much pallor, which our hot northern weather will soon make right. Anyway, they become you and look to wear well. If youre asked where you had them, you might say Saltus Fair. Such talk does no harm. "

  I promised I would, though I was far more concerned about the safety of Terminus Est, which I had left hidden in our room at the inn, than about my own appearance or the durability of the lay clothes I had bought from a slopman. "You and your assistant have come to see us draw out the miscreant, I suppose? Well be at him as soon as Mesmin and Sebald bring the post. A battering ram is what we called it when we passed the word of what was intended, but Im afraid the truth is that its nothing more than a tree trunk, and not a big one either - otherwise the village would have had to free too many men to handle it. Yet it should do the work. I dont suppose youve heard of the case we had here eighteen years gone?"

  Jonas and I shook our heads.

  The alcalde threw out his chest, as politicians do whenever they see an opportunity to speak for more than a couple of sentences. "I recall it well enough, though I wasnt more than a stripling. A woman. Ive forgotten her name, but we called her Mother Pyrexia. The stones were put up on her, just like what you see here, for its largely the same ones doing it, and they did it in the same way. But it was the other end of summer, just at apple-picking time, and that I recall very well because of the people drinking new cider in the crowd, and myself with a fresh apple to eat while I watched. "

  "Next year when the corn was up, someone wanted to buy the house. Property becomes the property of the town, you know. Thats how we finance the work, the ones that do it take what they can find for their share, and the town takes the house and ground. "

  "To shorten a lengthy tale, we cut a ram and broke through the door in fine fashion, thinking to sweep up the old womans bones and turn the place over to the new owner. " The alcalde paused and laughed, throwing back his head. There was something ghostly in that laughter, possibly only because it blended with the noise of the crowd, and so seemed silent.

  I asked, "Wasnt she dead?"

  "It depends on what you mean by that. Ill say this - a woman sealed in the dark long enough can become something very strange, just like the strange things you find in rotten wood, back among the big trees. Were miners, mostly, here in Saltus, and used to things found underground, but we took to our heels and came back with torches. It didnt like the light, or the fire either. "

  Jonas touched me on the shoulder and pointed to a swirl in the crowd. A group of purposeful-looking men were shouldering their way down the street. None had helmets or body armor, but several carried narrow-headed piletes, and the rest had brass-bound staves. I was strongly reminded of the volunteer guards who had admitted Drotte, Roche, Eata, and me to the necropolis so long ago. Behind these armed men were four who carried the tree trunk the alcalde had mentioned, a rough log about two spans across and six cubits long.

  A collective indrawn breath greeted them; it was followed by louder talk and some good-natured cheering. The alcalde left us to take charge, directing the men with staves to clear a space about the door of the sealed house and using his authority, when Jonas and I pushed forward to get a better view, to make the crowd give way for us.

  I had supposed that when all the breakers-in were in position they would proceed without ceremony. In that, I had reckoned without the alcalde. At the last possible moment he mounted the doorstep of the sealed house, and waving his hat for silence, addressed the crowd.

  "Welcome visitors and fellow villagers! In the time it takes to draw breath thrice, you will see us smash this barrier and drag out the bandit Barnoch. Whether he be dead, or, as we have good reason to believe - for he hasnt been in there that long - alive. You know what he has done. He has collaborated with the traitor Vodaluss cultellarii, informing them of the arrivals and departures of those who might become their victims! All of you are thinking now, and rightly!, that such a vile crime deserves no mercy. Yes, I say! Yes, we all say! Hundreds and maybe thousands lie in unmarked graves because of this Barnoch. Hundreds and maybe thousands have met a fate far worse!"

  "Yet for a moment, before these stones come down, I ask you to reflect. Vodalus has lost a spy. He will be seeking another. On some still night not long, I think, from now, a stranger will come to one of you. It is certain he will have much talk - "

  "Like you!" someone shouted, to general laughter.

  "Better talk than mine - Im only a rough miner, as many of you know. Much smooth, persuasive talk, I ought to have said, and possibly some money. Before you nod your head at him, I want you to remember this house of Barnochs the way it looks now, with those ashlars where the door should be. Think about your own house with no doors and no windows, but with you inside it. "

  "Then think about what youre going to see done to Barnoch when we take him out. Because Im telling you - you strangers particularly - what youre about to see here is only the beginning of what youll be seeing at our fair in Saltus! For the events of the next few days we have employed one of the finest professionals from Nessus! You will see at least two persons executed here in the formal style, with the head struck off at a single blow. Ones a woman, so well be using the chair! Thats something a lot of people who boast of their sophistication and the cosmopolitan tincture of their educations have never seen. And you will see this man," pausing, the alcalde struck the sunlit door-stones with the flat of his hand, "this Barnoch, led to Death by an expert guide! It may be that he has made some sort of small hole in the wall by now. Frequently they do, and if so he may be able to hear me. "

  He lifted his voice to a shout. "If you can, Barnoch, cut your throat now! Because if you dont, youre going to wish you had starved long ago!" For a moment there was silence. I was in agony at the thought that I should soon have to practice the Art on a follower of Vodaluss. The alcalde raised his right arm over his head, then brought it down in an emphatic gesture. "All right, lads, at it with a will!"

  The four who had brought the ram counted one, two, three to themselves as if by prearrangement and ran at the walled-up door, losing some of their impetuosity when the two in front mounted the step. The ram struck the stones with a loud thump, but with no other result.

  "All right, lads," the alcalde repeated. "Lets try it again. Show them the kind of men Saltus breeds. "

  The four charged a second time. At this attempt, those in front handled the step more skillfully; the stones plugging the doorway seemed to shudder under the impact, and a fine dust issued from the mortar. A volunteer from the crowd, a burly, black-bearded fellow, joined the original ramsmen, and all five charged; the thump of the ram was not noticeably louder, but it was accompanied by a cracking like the breaking of bones. "One more," the alcalde said.

  He was right. The next blow sent the stone it struck into the house, leaving a hole the size of a mans head. After that, the ramsmen no longer bothered with a running start; they knocked the remaining stones out by swinging the ram with their arms until the aperture was large enough for a man to step through.

  Someone I had not noticed previously had brought torches, and a boy ran to a neighboring house to kindle them at the kitchen fire. The men with piletes and staves took them from him. Showing more courage than I would have credited to those clever eyes, the alcalde drew a short truncheon from under his shirt and entered first. We spectators crowded after the armed men, and because Jonas and I had been in the forefront of the onlookers, we reached the opening almost at once.

  The air was foul, far worse than I had anticipated. Broken furniture lay on every side, as though Barnoch had locked his chests and cupboards when the sealers came, and they had smashed them to get at his household goods. On a crippled table, I saw the guttered wax of a candle that had burned to the wood. The people behind me were pushing
to go in farther; and I, as I discovered somewhat to my surprise, was pushing back.

  There was a commotion at the rear of the house - hurried and confused footsteps - a shout - then a high, inhuman scream.

  "Theyve got him!" someone behind me called, and I heard the news being passed to those outside.

  A fattish man who might have been a smallholder came running out of the dark, a torch in one hand and a stave in the other. "Out of the way! Get back, all of you! Theyre bringing him out!"

  I do not know what I expected to see . . . Perhaps a filthy creature with matted hair. What came instead was a ghost. Barnoch had been tall; he was tall still, but stooped and very thin, with skin so pale it seemed to glow as decayed wood does. He was hairless, bald, and beardless; I learned that afternoon from his guards that he had formed the habit of plucking his hairs out. Worst of all were his eyes protuberant, seemingly blind, and dark as the black abscess of his mouth. I turned away from him as he spoke, but I knew the voice was his. "I will be free," it said. "Vodalus! Vodalus will come!"

  How I wished then that I had never been imprisoned myself, for his voice brought back to me all those airless days when I waited in the oubliette beneath our Matachin Tower. I too had dreamed of rescue by Vodalus, of a revolution that would sweep away the animal stench and degeneracy of the present age and restore the high and gleaming culture that was once Urths.

  And I had been saved not by Vodalus and his shadowy army, but by the advocacy of Master Palaemon - and no doubt of Drotte and Roche and a few other friends - who had persuaded the brothers that it would be too dangerous to kill me and too disgraceful to bring me before a tribunal.

  Barnoch would not be saved at all. I, who should have been his comrade, would brand him, break him on the wheel, and at last sever his head. I tried to tell myself that he had acted, perhaps, only to get money; but as I did so some metal object, no doubt the steel head of a pilete, struck stone, and I seemed to hear the ringing of the coin Vodalus had given me, the ringing as I dropped it into the space beneath the floor-stone of the ruined mausoleum.

  Sometimes when all our attention is thus focused on memory, our eyes, unguided by ourselves, will distinguish from a mass of detail some single object, presenting it with a clarity never achieved by concentration. So it was with me. Out of all the struggling tide of faces beyond the doorway, I saw one, upturned, illuminated by the sun. It was Agias.

  Chapter 3

  THE SHOWMANS TENT

  The instant was frozen as though we two, and all those about us, stood in a painting. Agias uptilted face, my own wide eyes; so we remained amid the cloud of country folk with their bright clothes and bundles. Then I moved, and she was gone. I would have run to her if I could; but I could only push my way through the onlookers, taking perhaps a hundred poundings of my heart to reach the spot where she had stood.

  By then she had vanished utterly, and the crowd was swirling and changing like the water under the bow of a boat. Barnoch had been led forth, screaming at the sun. I took a miner by the shoulder and shouted a question to him, but he had paid no attention to the young woman beside him and had no notion of where she might have gone. I followed the throng who followed the prisoner until I was sure she was not among them, then, knowing nothing better to do, began to search the fair, peering into tents and booths, and making inquiries of the farmwives who had come to sell their fragrant cardamom-bread, and of the hot-meat vendors. All this, as I write it, slowly convoluting a thread of the vermilion ink of the House Absolute, sounds calm and even methodical. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was gasping and sweating as I did these things, shouting questions to which I hardly stayed for an answer. Like a face seen in dream, Agias floated before my imagination: wide, flat cheeks and softly rounded chin, freckled, sun-browned skin and long, laughing, mocking eyes. Why she had come, I could not imagine; I only knew she had, and that my glimpse of her had reawakened the anguish of my memory of her scream.

  "Have you seen a woman so tall, with chestnut hair?" I repeated it again and again, like the duelist who had called out "Cadroe of Seventeen Stones," until the phrase was as meaningless as the song of the cicada.

  "Yes. Every country maid who comes here. "

  "Do you know her name?"

  "A woman? Certainly I can get you a woman. "

  "Where did you lose her?"

  "Dont worry, youll soon find her again. The fairs not big enough for anybody to stay lost long. Didnt the two of you arrange a place to meet? Have some of my tea - you look so tired. "

  I fumbled for a coin.

  "You dont have to pay, I sell enough as it is. Well, if you insist. Its only an aes. Here. "

  The old woman rummaged in her apron pocket and produced a flood of little coins, then splashed the tea, hissing-hot, from her kettle into an earthenware cup and offered me a straw of some dimly silver metal. I waved it away.

  "Its clean. I rinse everything after each customer. "

  "Im not used to them. "

  "Watch the rim then - itll be hot. Have you looked by the judging? Therell be a lot of people there. "

  "Where the cattle are? Yes. " The tea was mate, spicy and a trifle bitter.

  "Does she know youre looking for her?"

  "I dont think so. Even if she saw me, she wouldnt have recognized me. I . . . am not dressed as I usually am. "

  The old woman snorted and pushed a straggling lock of gray hair back under her kerchief. "At Saltus Fair? Of course not! Everybody wears his best to a fair, and any girl with sense would know that. How about down by the water where theyve got the prisoner chained?"

  I shook my head. "She seems to have disappeared. "

  "But you havent given up. I can tell from the way you look at the people going past instead of me. Well, good for you. Youll find her yet, though they do say all manner of strange things have been happening round and about of late. They caught a green man, do you know that? Got him right over there where you see the tent. Green men know everything, people say, if you can but make them talk. Then theres the cathedral. I suppose youve heard about that?"