The Claw of the Conciliator

by Gene Wolfe

Page 3

 

  "The cathedral?"

  "Ive heard tell it wasnt what city folk call a real one - I know youre from the city by the way you drink your tea - but its the only cathedral most of us around Saltus ever saw, and pretty too, with all the hanging lamps and the windows in the sides made of colored silk. Myself, I dont believe - or rather, I think that if the Pancreator dont care nothing for me, I wont care nothing for him, and why should I? Still, its a shame what they did, if they did whats told against them. Set fire to it, you know. "

  "Are you talking about the Cathedral of the Pelerines?"

  The old woman nodded sagely. "There, you said it yourself. Youre making the same mistake they did. It wasnt the Cathedral of the Pelerines, it was the Cathedral of the Claw. Which is to say, it wasnt theirs to burn. "

  To myself I muttered, "They rekindled the fire. "

  "I beg pardon. " The old woman cocked an ear. "I didnt hear that. "

  "I said they burned it. They must have set fire to the straw floor. "

  "Thats what I heard too. They just stood back and watched it burn. It went up to the Infinite Meadows of the New Sun, you know. "

  A man on the opposite side of the alleyway began to pound a drum. When he paused I said, "I know that certain persons have claimed to have seen it rise into the air. "

  "Oh, it rose all right. When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool - it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He cant see the Hand in nature. "

  "He didnt see it himself?" I asked. "The cathedral, I mean. "

  She failed to understand. "Oh, hes seen it when theyve been through here, at least a dozen times. "

  The chant of the man with the drum, similar to that I had once heard Dr. Talos use, but more hoarsely delivered and bereft of the doctors malicious intelligence, cut through our talk. "Knows everything! Knows everybody! Green as a gooseberry! See for yourself!"

  (The insistent voice of the drum: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)

  "Do you think the green man would know where Agia is?"

  The old woman smiled. "So thats her name, is it? Now Ill know, if anybody should mention her. He might. Youve money, why not try him?"

  Why not indeed, I thought.

  "Brought from the jun-gles of the North! Never eats! A-kin to the bush-es and the grass-es!" BOOM! BOOM! "The fu-ture and the re-mote past are one to him!" When he saw me approaching the door of his tent, the drummer stopped his clamor. "Only an aes to see him. Two to speak with him. Three to be alone with him. "

  "Alone for how long?" I asked as I selected three copper aes.

  A wry grin crossed the drummers face. "For as long as you wish. " I handed him his money and stepped inside.

  It had been plain he had not thought I would want to stay long, and I expected a stench or something equally unpleasant. There was nothing beyond a slight odor as of hay curing. In the center of the tent, in a dust-spangled shaft of sunlight admitted by a vent in the canvas roof, was chained a man the color of pale jade. He wore a kilt of leaves, now fading; beside him stood a clay pot filled to the brim with clear water.

  For a moment we were silent. I stood looking at him. He sat looking at the ground. "Thats not paint," I said. "Nor do I think it dye. And you have no more hair than the man I saw dragged from the sealed house. "

  He looked up at me, then down again. Even the whites of his eyes held a greenish tint.

  I tried to bait him. "If you are truly vegetable, I would think your hair should be grass. "

  "No. " He had a soft voice, saved from womanishness only by its depth.

  "You are vegetable then? A speaking plant?"

  "You are no countryman. "

  "I left Nessus a few days ago. "

  "With some education. "

  I thought of Master Palaemon, then of Master Malrubius and my poor Thecla, and I shrugged. "I can read and write. "

  "Yet you know nothing about me. I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being. "

  "The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues. " For all his aspect of despair (and his was a sadder face by far than my friend Jonass), something tugged at the corners of his lips.

  "That is well put. You have no scientific training, but you are better taught than you realize. "

  "On the contrary, all my training has been scientific - although it had nothing to do with these fantastic speculations. What are you?"

  "A great seer. A great liar, like every man whose foot is in a trap. "

  "If youll tell me what you are, Ill endeavor to help you. "

  He looked at me, and it was as if some tall herb had opened eyes and shown a human face. "I believe you," he said. "Why is it that you, of all the hundreds who come to this tent, know pity?"

  "I know nothing of pity, but I have been imbued with a respect for justice, and I am well acquainted with the alcalde of this village. A green man is still a man; and if he is a slave, his master must show how he came to that state, and how he himself came into possession of him. "

  The green man said, "Im a fool, I suppose, to put any confidence in you. And yet I do. I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age. "

  "That is impossible. "

  "The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankinds long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended. "

  "But you must have sun. "

  "Yes," the green man said. "And I have not enough here. Day is brighter in my age. "

  That simple remark thrilled me in a way that nothing had since I had first glimpsed the unroofed chapel in the Broken Court of our Citadel. "Then the New Sun comes as prophesied," I said, "and there is indeed a second life for Urth - if what you say is the truth. "

  The green man threw back his head and laughed. Much later I was to hear the sound the alzabo makes as it ranges the snow-swept tablelands of the high country; its laughter is horrible, but the green mans was more terrible, and I drew away from him. "Youre not a human being," I said. "Not now, if you ever were. "

  He laughed again. "And to think I hoped in you. What a poor creature I am. I thought I had resigned myself to dying here among a people who are no more than walking dust; but at the tiniest gleam, all my resignation fell from me. I am a true man, friend. You are not, and in a few months I will be dead. "

  I remembered his kin. How often I had seen the frozen stalks of summer flowers dashed by the wind against the sides of the mausoleums in our necropolis. "I understand you. The warm days of sun are coming, but when they are gone, you will go with them. Grow seed while you can. "

  He sobered. "You do not believe me or even understand that I am a man like yourself, yet you still pity me. Perhaps you are right, and for us a new sun has come, and because it has come we have forgotten it. If I am ever able to return to my own time, I will tell them there of you. "

  "If you are indeed of the future, why cannot you go forward to your home, and so escape?"

  "Because I am chained, as you see. " He held out his leg so that I could examine the shackle about his ankle. His beryline flesh was swollen about it, as I have seen the bark of a tree swollen that had grown through an iron ring.

  The tent flap opened, and the drummer thrust his head through. "Are you still here? I have others outside. " He looked significantly at the green
man and withdrew.

  "He means that I must drive you off, or he will close the vent through which my sunlight falls. I drive away those who pay to see me by foretelling their futures, and I will foretell yours. You are young now, and strong. But before this world has wound itself ten times more about the sun you shall be less strong, and you shall never regain the strength that is yours now. If you breed sons, you will engender enemies against yourself. If - "

  "Enough!" I said. "What you are telling me is only the fortune of all men. Answer one question truthfully for me, and I will go. I am looking for a woman called Agia. Where will I find her?"

  For a moment his eyes rolled upward until only a narrow crescent of pale green showed beneath their lids. A faint tremor seized him; he stood and extended his arms, his fingers splayed like twigs. Slowly he said, "Above ground. "

  The tremor ceased, and he sat again, older-looking and paler than before. "You are only a fraud then," I told him as I turned away. "And I was a simpleton to believe in you even by so little. "

  "No," the green man whispered. "Listen. In coming here, I have passed through all your future. Some parts of it remain with me, no matter how clouded. I told you only the truth - and if you are indeed a friend of the alcalde of this place, I will tell you something further that you may tell him, something I have learned from the questions of those who have come to question me. Armed men are seeking to free a man called Barnoch. "

  I took my whetstone from the sabretache at my belt, broke it on the top of the chain-stake, and gave half to him. For a moment he did not comprehend what it was he held. Then I saw the knowledge growing in him, so that he seemed to unfold in his great joy, as though he were already basking in the brighter light of his own day.

  Chapter 4

  THE BOUQUET

  As I left the showmans tent, I glanced up at the sun. The western horizon had already climbed more than half up the sky; in a watch or less it would be time for me to make my appearance. Agia was gone, and any hope of overtaking her had been lost in the frantic time I had spent dashing from one end of the fair to the other; yet I took comfort from the green mans prophecy, which I took to mean that Agia and I should meet again before either of us died, and from the thought that since she had come to watch Barnoch drawn into the light, so, equally, might she come to observe the executions of Morwenna and the cattle thief.

  These speculations occupied me at first as I made my way back to the inn. But before I reached the room I shared with Jonas, they had been displaced by recollections of Thecla and my elevation to journeyman, both occasioned by the need to change from my new lay clothes into the fuligin of the guild. So strong is the power of association that it could be exercised by that habit while it was still out of sight on the pegs in the room, and by Terminus Est while she remained concealed beneath the mattress.

  It used to entertain me, while I was still attendant upon Thecla, to find that I could anticipate much of her conversation, and particularly the first of it, from the nature of the gift I carried when I entered her cell. If it were some favorite food thieved from the kitchen, for example, it would elicit a description of a meal at the House Absolute, and the kind of food I brought even governed the nature of the repast described: flesh, a sporting dinner with the shrieking and trumpeting of game caught alive drifting up from the abattoir below and much talk of brachets, hawks, and hunting leopards; sweets, a private repast given by one of the great Chatelaines for a few friends, deliciously intimate, and soaked in gossip; fruit, a twilit garden party in the vast park of the House Absolute, lit by a thousand torches and enlivened by jugglers, actors, dancers, and pyrotechnic displays.

  She ate standing as often as sitting, walking the three strides that took her from one end of her cell to the other, holding the dish in her left hand while she gestured with her right. "Like this, Severian, they all spring into the ringing sky, showering green and magenta sparks, while the maroons boom like thunder!"

  But her poor hand could hardly show the rockets rising higher than her towering head, for the ceiling was not much taller than she.

  "But Im boring you. A moment ago, when you brought me these peaches, you looked so happy, and now you wont smile. Its just that it does me good, here, to remember those things. How Ill enjoy them when I see them again. "

  I was not bored, of course. It was only that it saddened me to see her, a woman still young and endowed with a terrible beauty, so confined . . .

  Jonas was uncovering Terminus Est for me when I came into our room. I poured myself a cup of wine. "How do you feel?" he asked.

  "What of you? Its your first time, after all. "

  He shrugged. "I only have to fetch and carry. Youve done it before? I wondered, because you look so young. "

  "Yes, Ive done it before. Never to a woman. "

  "You think shes innocent?"

  I was taking off my shirt; when I had my arms freed I mopped my face with it and shook my head. "Im sure shes not. I went down and talked to her last night - they have her chained at the edge of the water, where the midges are bad. I told you about it. "

  Jonas reached for the wine himself, his metal hand clinking when it met the cup. "You told me that she was beautiful, and that she had black hair like - "

  "Thecla. But Morwennas is straight. Theclas curled. "

  "Like Thecla, whom you seem to have loved as I love your friend Jolenta. I confess you had a great deal more time to fall in love than I did. And you told me she said her husband and child had died of some sickness, probably from bad water. The husband had been quite a bit older than she. "

  I said, "About your age, I think. "

  "And there was an older woman there who had wanted him too, and now she was tormenting the prisoner. "

  "Only with words. " Among the guild, apprentices alone wear shirts. I drew on my trousers and put my cloak (which was of fuligin, the color darker than black) around my bare shoulders. "Clients who have been exposed by the authorities like that have usually been stoned. When we see them theyre bruised, and often theyve lost a few teeth. Sometimes they have broken bones. The women have been raped. "