by Gene Wolfe
“There must be a great many old chairs,” I said.
“Not like that one. I knew everything about it — the carving on the legs and even the pattern in the grain of the arms. So much came back then. And then here, when I vomited those pieces of lead, things like hard, heavy seeds, then I knew. Do you remember, Severian, how it was when we left the Botanic Garden? You, Agia, and I came out of that great, glass vivarium, and you hired a boat to take us from the island to the shore, and the river was full of nenuphars with blue flowers and shining green leaves. Their seeds are like that, hard and heavy and dark, and I have heard that they sink to the bottom of Gyoll and remain there for whole ages of the world. But when chance brings them near the surface they sprout no matter how old they may be, so that the flowers of a chiliad past are seen to bloom again.”
“I have heard that too,” I said. “But it means nothing to you or me.”
Dorcas lay still, but her voice trembled. “What is the power that calls them back? Can you explain it?”
“The sunshine, I suppose — but no, I cannot explain it.”
“And is there no source of sunlight except the sun?”
I knew then what it was she meant, though something in me could not accept it.
“When that man — Hildegrin, the man we met a second time on top of the tomb in the ruined stone town — was ferrying us across the Lake of Birds, he talked of millions of dead people, people whose bodies had been sunk in that water. How were they made to sink, Severian? Bodies float. How do they weight them? I don’t know. Do you?”
I did. “They force lead shot down the throats.”
“I thought so.” Her voice was so weak now that I could scarcely hear her, even in that silent little room. “No, I knew so. I knew it when I saw them.”
“You think that the Claw brought you back.”
Dorcas nodded.
“It has acted, sometimes, I’ll admit that. But only when I took it out, and not always then. When you pulled me out of the water in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it was in my sabretache and I didn’t even know I had it.”
“Severian, you allowed me to hold it once before. Could I see it again now?”
I pulled it from its soft pouch and held it up. The blue fires seemed sleepy, but I could see the cruel-looking hook at the center of the gem that had given it its name. Dorcas extended her hand, but I shook my head, remembering the wineglass.
“You think I will do it some harm, don’t you? I won’t. It would be a sacrilege.”
“If you believe what you say, and I think you do, then you must hate it for drawing you back…”
“From death.” She was watching the ceiling again, now smiling as if she shared some deep and ludicrous secret with it. “Go ahead and say it. It won’t hurt you.”
“From sleep,” I said. “Since if one can be recalled from it, it is not death — not death as we have always understood it, the death that is in our minds when we say death. Although I have to confess it is still almost impossible for me to believe that the Conciliator, dead now for so many thousands of years, should act through this stone to raise others.”
Dorcas made no reply. I could not even be sure she was listening.
“You mentioned Hildegrin,” I said, “and the time he rowed us across the lake in his boat, to pick the avern. Do you remember what he said of death? It was that she was a good friend to the birds. Perhaps we ought to have known then that such a death could not be death as we imagine it.”
“If I say I believe all that, will you let me hold the Claw?”
I shook my head again.
Dorcas was not looking at me, but she must have seen the motion of my shadow; or perhaps it was only that her mental Severian on the ceiling shook his head as well. “You are right, then — I was going to destroy it if I could. Shall I tell you what I really believe? I believe I have been dead — not sleeping, but dead. That all my life took place a long, long time ago when I lived with my husband above a little shop, and took care of our child. That this Conciliator of yours who came so long ago was an adventurer from one of the ancient races who outlived the universal death.” Her hands clutched the blanket. “I ask you, Severian, when he comes again, isn’t he to be called the New Sun? Doesn’t that sound like it? And I believe that when he came he brought with him something that had the same power over time that Father Inire’s mirrors are said to have over distance. It is that gem of yours.”
She stopped and turned her head to look at me defiantly; when I said nothing, she continued. “Severian, when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you half healed your friend’s wounds, it was because it bent the moment to one when they would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the fen in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it must have touched me or nearly touched me, and for me it became the time in which I had lived, so that I lived again. But I have been dead. For a long, long time I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved in the brown water. And there is something in me that is dead still.”
“There is something in all of us that has always been dead,” I said. “If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children.”
“I’m going to go back, Severian. I know that now, and that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I have to go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened to’ me. I know you can’t go with me…” I nodded.
“And I’m not asking you to. I don’t even want you to. I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same. I don’t want to take death with me when I go to look for my life.”
“I understand,” I said.
“My child may still be alive — an old man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to know.”
“Yes,” I said. But I could not help adding, “There was a time when you told me I was not death. That I must not let others persuade me to think of myself in that way. It was behind the orchard on the grounds of the House Absolute. Do you remember?”
“You have been death to me,” she said. “I have succumbed to the trap I warned you of, if you like. Perhaps you are not death, but you will remain what you are, a torturer and a carnifex, and your hands will run with blood. Since you remember that time at the House Absolute so well, perhaps you… I can’t say it. The Conciliator, or the Claw, or the Increate, has done this to me. Not you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Dr. Talos gave us both money afterward, in the clearing. The money he had got from some court official for our play. When we were traveling, I gave everything to you. May I have it back? I’ll need it. If not all of it, at least some of it.”
I emptied the money in my sabretache onto the table. It was as much as I had received from her, or a trifle more.
“Thank you,” she said. “You won’t need it?”
“Not as badly as you will. Besides, it is yours.”
“I’m going to leave tomorrow, if I feel strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not. I don’t suppose you know how often the boats put out, going downriver?”
“As often as you want them to. You push them in, and the river does the rest.”
“That’s not like you, Severian, or at least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have said, from what you’ve told me. Which reminds me that you’re not the first visitor I’ve had today. Our friend — your friend, at least — Hethor was here. That’s not funny to you, is it? I’m sorry, I just wanted to change the subject.”
“He enjoys it. Enjoys watching me.”
“Thousands of people do when you perform in public, and you enjoy doing it yourself.”
“They come to be horrified, so they can congratulate themselves later on being alive. And because they like the excitement, and the suspense of not knowing whether the condemned will break down, or if some macabre accident will occur. I enj
oy exercising my skill, the only real skill I have — enjoy making things go perfectly. Hethor wants something else.”
“The pain?”
“Yes, the pain, but something more too.”
Dorcas said, “He worships you, you know. He talked with me for some time, and I think he would walk into a fire if you told him to.” I must have winced at that, because she continued, “All this about Hethor is making you ill, isn’t it? One sick person is enough. Let’s speak of something else.”
“Not ill as you are, no. But I can’t think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with his mouth open and his eyes…”
She stirred uncomfortably. “Yes, those eyes — I saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldn’t be the one to say that. A corpse’s eyes. You have the feeling that if you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move under your finger.”
“That isn’t it at all. When I was on the scaffold in Saltus and looked down and saw him, his eyes danced. You said, though, that the dull eyes he has at most times reminded you of a corpse’s. Haven’t you ever looked into the glass? Your own eyes are not the eyes of a dead woman.”
“Perhaps not.” Dorcas paused. “You used to say they were beautiful.”
“Aren’t you glad to live? Even if your husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once lived in is a ruin — if all those things are true — aren’t you full of joy because you are here again? You’re not a ghost, not a revenant like those we saw in the ruined town. Look in the glass as I told you. Or if you won’t, look into my face or any man’s and see what you are.”
Dorcas sat up even more slowly and painfully than she had risen to drink the wine, but this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and I saw that she was naked under the thin blanket. Before her illness Jolenta’s skin had been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery. Dorcas’s was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfection than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh. Conscious of how culpable it would be to force myself on her or even to persuade her to open to me now, when she was ill and I was on the point of leaving her, I still felt desire for her stir in me. However much I love a woman — or however little — I find I want her most when I can no longer have her. But what I felt for Dorcas was stronger than that, and more complex. She had been, though only for so brief a time, the closest friend I had known, and our possession of each other, from the frantic desire in our converted storeroom in Nessus to the long and lazy playing in the bedchamber of the Vincula, was the characteristic act of our friendship as well as our love. “You’re crying,” I said. “Do you want me to leave?” She shook her head, and then, as though she could no longer contain the words that seemed to force themselves out, she whispered, “Oh, won’t you go too, Severian? I didn’t mean it. Won’t you come? Won’t you come with me?”
“I can’t.”
She sank back into the narrow bed, smaller now and more childlike. “I know. You have your duty to your guild. You can’t betray it again and face yourself, and I won’t ask you. It’s only that I never quite gave up hoping you might.” I shook my head as I had before. “I have to flee the city—”
“Severian!”
“And to the north. You’ll be going south, and if I were with you, we would have courier boats full of soldiers after us.”
“Severian, what happened?” Dorcas’s face was very calm, but her eyes were wide.
“I freed a woman. I was supposed to strangle her and throw her body into the Acis, and I could have done it — I didn’t feel anything for her, not really, and it should have been easy. But when I was alone with her, I thought of Thecla. We were in a little summerhouse screened with shrubbery, that stood at the edge of the water. I had my hands around her neck, and I thought of Thecla and how I had wanted to free her. I couldn’t find a way to do it. Have I ever told you?” Almost imperceptibly, Dorcas shook her head. “There were brothers everywhere, five to pass by the shortest route, and all of them knew me and knew of her.” (Thecla was shrieking now in some corner of my mind.) “All I really would have had to do would have been to tell them Master Gurloes had ordered me to bring her to him. But I would have had to go with her then, and I was still trying to devise some way by which I could stay in the guild. I did not love her enough.”
“It’s past now,” Dorcas said. “And, Severian, death is not the terrible thing you think it.” We had reversed our roles, like lost children who comfort each other alternately.
I shrugged. The ghost I had eaten at Vodalus’s banquet was nearly calm again; I could feel her long, cool fingers on my brain, and though I could not turn inside my own skull to see her, I knew her deep and violet eyes were behind my own. It required an effort not to speak with her voice. “At any rate, I was there with the woman, in the summerhouse, and we were alone. Her name was Cyriaca. I knew or at least suspected that she knew where the Pelerines were — she had been one of them for a time. There are silent means of excruciation that require no equipment, and although they are not spectacular, they are quite effective. One reaches into the body, as it were, and manipulates the client’s nerves directly. I was going to use what we call Humbaba’s Stick, but before I had touched her she told me. The Pelerines are near the pass of Orithyia caring for the wounded. This woman had a letter, she said, only a week ago, from someone she had known in the order…”
XII
Following the Flood
THE SUMMERHOUSE HAD boasted a solid roof, but the sides were mere latticework, closed more by the tall forest ferns planted against them than by their slender laths. Moonbeams leaked through. More came in at the doorway, reflected from the rushing water outside. I could see the fear in Cyriaca’s face, and the knowledge that her only hope was that I retained some love for her; and I knew that she was thus without hope, for I felt nothing.
“At the Autarch’s camp,” she repeated. “That was what Einhildis wrote. In Orithyia, near the springs of Gyoll. But you must be careful if you go there to return the book — she said too that cacogens had landed somewhere in the north.”
I stared at her, trying to determine whether she were lying.
“That’s what Einhildis told me. I suppose they must have wished to avoid the mirrors at theJHouse Absolute so they, could escape the eyes of the Autarch. He’s supposed to be their servitor, but sometimes he acts as if they were his.”
I shook her. “Are you joking with me? The Autarch serves them?”
“Please! Oh, please…”
I dropped her.
“Everyone… Erebus! Pardon me.” She sobbed, and though she lay in shadow I sensed that she was wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her scarlet habit. “Everyone knows it except the peons, and the goodmen and the good women. All the armigers and even most of the optimates, and of course the exultants have always known. I’ve never seen the Autarch, but I’m told that he, the Viceroy of the New Sun, is scarcely taller than I am. Do you think our proud exultants would permit someone like that to rule if there weren’t a thousand cannon behind him?”
“I’ve seen him,” I said, “and I wondered about that.” I sought among Thecla’s memories for confirmation of what Cyriaca said, but I found only rumor.
“Would you tell me about him? Please, Severian, before—”
“No, not now. But why should the cacogens be a danger to me?”
“Because the Autarch will surely send scouts to locate them, and I suppose the archon here will too. Anyone found near them will be assumed to have been spying for them, or what’s worse, seeking them out in the hope of enlisting them in some plot against the Phoenix Throne.”
“I understand.”
“Severian, don’t kill me. I beg you. I’m not a good woman — I’ve never been a good woman, never since I left the Pelerines, and I can’t face dying now.”
I asked her, “What have you done, anyway? Why
does Abdiesus want you killed? Do you know?” It is simplicity itself to strangle an individual whose neck muscles are not strong, and I was already flexing my hands for the task; yet at the same time I wished it had been permissible for me to use Terminus Est instead.
“Only loved too many men, men other than my husband.”
As if moved by the memory of those embraces, she rose and came toward me. Again the moonlight fell upon her face; her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
“He was cruel to me, so cruel, after our marriage… and so I took a lover, to spite him, and afterwards, another…”
(Her voice dropped until I could hardly hear the words.)
“And at last taking a new lover becomes a habit, a way of pushing back the days and showing yourself that all your life has not run between your fingers already, showing yourself that you are still young enough for men to bring gifts, young enough that men still want to stroke your hair. That was what I had left the Pelerines for, after all.” She paused and seemed to gather her strength. “Do you know how old I am? Did I tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“I won’t, then. But I might almost be your mother. If I had conceived within a year or two of the time it became possible for me. We were far in the south, where the great ice, all blue and white, sails on black seas. There was a little hill where I used to stand and watch, and I dreamed of putting on warm clothes and paddling out to the ice with food and a trained bird I never really had but only wanted to have, and so riding my own ice island north to an isle of palms, where I would discover the ruins of a castle built in the morning of the world. You would have been born then, perhaps, while I was alone on the ice. Why shouldn’t an imaginary child be born on an imaginary trip? You would have grown up fishing and swimming in water wanner than milk.”
“No woman is killed for being unfaithful, except by her husband,” I said.
Cyriaca sighed, and her dream fell from her. “Among the landed armigers hereabout, he is one of the few who support the archon. The others hope that by disobeying him as much as they dare and fomenting trouble among the eclectics they can persuade the Autarch to replace him. I have made my husband a laughing stock — and by extension his friends and the archon.”
