by Gene Wolfe
I recalled then what the giant had told me when we parted in the forest beyond the Autarch’s gardens — that he was the doctor’s master. Now, before I had time to consider what I was doing, I seized the doctor’s hand. Its skin seemed as warm and living as my own, though curiously dry. After a moment he jerked away.
“What are you?” I demanded, and when he did not answer, I turned to the beings who called themselves Famulimus and Barbatus. “Once, sieurs, I knew a man who was only partly human flesh…”
They looked toward the giant instead of replying, and though I knew their faces were only masks, I felt the force of their demand.
“A homunculus,” Baldanders rumbled.
XXXIV
Masks
THE RAIN CAME as he spoke, a cold rain that struck the rude, gray stones of the castle with a million icy fists. I sat down, clamping Terminus Est between my knees to keep them from shaking.
“I had already concluded,” I said with as much self-possession as I could summon, “that when the islanders told me of a small man who paid for the building of this place, they were speaking of the doctor. But they said that you, the giant, had come afterward.”
“I was the small man. The doctor came afterward.”
A cacogen showed a dripping, nightmare face at the window, then vanished. Possibly he had conveyed some message to Ossipago, though I heard nothing. Ossipago spoke without turning. “Growth has its disadvantages, though for your species it is the only method by which youth can be reinstated.”
Dr. Talos sprang to his feet. “We will overcome them! He has put himself in my hands.”
Baldanders said, “I was forced to. There was no one else. I created my own physician.”
I was still attempting to regain my mental balance as I looked from one to the other; there was no change in the appearance or manner of either. “But he beats you,” I said. “I have seen him.”
“Once I overheard you while you confided in the smaller woman. You destroyed another woman, whom you loved. Yet you were her slave.”
Dr. Talos said, “I must get him up, you see. He must exercise, and it is a part of what I do for him. I’m told that the Autarch — whose health is the happiness of his subjects — has an isochronon in his sleeping chamber, a gift from another autarch from beyond the edge of the world. Perhaps it is the master of these gentlemen here. I don’t know. Anyway, he fears a dagger at his throat and will let no one near him when he sleeps, so this device tells the watches of his night. When dawn comes, it rouses him. How then should he, the master of the Commonwealth, permit his sleep to be disturbed by a mere machine? Baldanders created me as his physician, as he told you. Severian, you’ve known me some time. Would you say I was much afflicted with the infamous vice of false modesty?”
I managed a smile as I shook my head.
“Then I must tell you that I am not responsible for my virtues, such as they are. Baldanders wisely made me all that he is not, so that I might counterweight his deficiencies. I am not fond of money, for example. That’s an excellent thing for the patient, in a personal physician. And I am loyal, to my friends, because he is the first of them.”
“Still,” I said, “I have always been astounded that he did not slay you.” It was so cold in the room that I drew my cloak closer about me, though I felt sure that the present deceptive calm could not long endure.
The giant said, “You must know why I keep my temper in check. You have seen me lose it. To have them sitting there, watching me, as though I were a bear on a chain—”
Dr. Talos touched his hand; there was something womanly in the gesture. “It’s his glands, Severian. The endocrine system and the thyroid. Everything must be managed so carefully, otherwise he would grow too fast. And then I must see that his weight doesn’t break his bones, and a thousand other things.”
“The brain,” the giant rumbled. “The brain is the worst of all, and the best.”
I said, “Did the Claw help you? If not, perhaps it will, in my hands. It has performed more for me in a short time than it did for the Pelerines in many years.”
When Baldanders’s face showed no sign of comprehension, Dr. Talos said, “He means the gem the fishermen sent. It is supposed to perform miraculous cures.”
At that Ossipago turned to face us at last. “How interesting. You have it here? May we see it?”
The doctor looked anxiously from the cacogen’s expressionless mask to Baldanders’s face and back again as he said, “Please, Your Worships, it is nothing. A fragment of corundum.”
In all the time since I had entered this level of the tower, none of the cacogens had shifted his place by more than a cubit; now Ossipago crossed to my chair with short, waddling steps. I must have recoiled from him, for he said, “You need not fear me, though we do your kind much hurt. I want to hear about this Claw, which the homunculus tells us is only a mineral specimen.”
When I heard him say that, I was afraid that he and his companions would take the Claw from Baldanders and carry it to their own home beyond the void, but I reasoned that they could not do so unless they forced him to produce it, and that if they did that, it might be possible for me to gain possession of it, which I might fail to do otherwise. So I told Ossipago all the things the Claw had accomplished while it had been in my keeping — about the uhlan on the highway, and the man-apes, and all the other instances of its power that I have already recorded here. As I spoke, the giant’s face grew harder, and the doctor’s, I thought, more anxious.
When I had finished, Ossipago said, “And now we must see the wonder itself. Bring it out, please,” and Baldanders rose and stalked across the wide room, making all his machines appear mere toys by his size, and at last pulled out the drawer of a little, white-topped table and took out the gem. It was more dull in his hand than I had ever seen it; it might have been a bit of blue glass.
The cacogen took it from him and held it up in his painted glove, though he did not turn up his face to look at it as a man would. There it seemed to catch the light from the yellow lamps that sprouted downward from above, and in that light it flashed a clear azure. “Very beautiful,” he said. “And most interesting, though it cannot have performed the feats ascribed to it.”
“Obviously,” Famulimus sang, and made another of those gestures that so recalled to me the statues in the gardens of the Autarch.
“It is mine,” I told them. “The shore people took it from me by force. May I have it back?”
“If it is yours,” Barbatus said, “where did you get it?”
I began the task of describing my meeting with Agia and the destruction of the altar of the Pelerines, but he cut me short.
“All this is speculation. You did not see this jewel upon the altar, nor did you feel the woman’s hand when she gave it to you, if in fact she did. Where did you get it?”
“I found it in a compartment of my sabretache.” It seemed that there was nothing else to say.
Barbatus turned away as though disappointed. “And you…” He looked toward Baldanders. “Ossipago has the jewel now, and he got it from you. Where did you get it?”
Baldanders rumbled, “You saw me. From the drawer of that table.”
The cacogen nodded by moving his mask with his hands. “You see then, Severian, his claim has become as good as yours.”
“But the gem is mine and not his.”
“It is not our task to judge between you; you must settle that when we are gone. But out of curiosity, which torments even such strange creatures as you believe us to be — Baldanders, will you keep it?”
The giant shook his head. “I would not have such a monument to superstition in my laboratory.”
“Then there should be little difficulty in effecting a settlement,” Barbatus declared. “Severian, would you like to watch our craft rise? Baldanders always comes to see us off, and though he is not the type to rhapsodize over views artificial or natural, I should think myself that it must be worth seeing.” He turned away, adjusting his
white robes.
“Worshipful Hierodules,” I said, “I would very much like to, but I want to ask you something before you go. When I arrived, you said you had no greater joy than seeing me, and you knelt. Did you mean what you said, or anything like it? Were you confusing me with someone else?”
Baldanders and Dr. Talos had risen to their feet when the cacogen first mentioned his departure. Now, though Famulimus remained to listen to my questions, the others had already begun to move away; Barbatus was mounting the stair that led to the level above, with Ossipago, still carrying the Claw, not far behind him.
I began to walk too, because I feared to be separated from it, and Famulimus walked with me. “Though you did not now pass our test, I meant no less than what I said to you.” His voice was like the music of some wonderful bird, bridging the abyss from a wood unattainable. “How often we have taken counsel, Liege. How often we have done each other’s will. You know the water women, I believe. Are Ossipago, brave Barbatus, I, to be so much less sapient than they?”
I drew a deep breath. “I don’t know what you mean. But somehow I feel that though you and your kind are hideous, you are good. And that the undines are not, though they are so lovely, as well as so monstrous, that I can scarcely look at them.”
“Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?”
I had not, and could only stare.
“And you will kindly tolerate my looks. Without offense may I remove this mask? We both know it for one and it is hot. Baldanders is ahead and will not see.”
“If you wish, Worship,” I said. “But won’t you tell—”
With a quick flick of one hand, as though with relief, Famulimus stripped away the disguise. The face revealed was no face, only eyes in a sheet of putrescence. Then the hand moved again as before, and that too fell away. Beneath it was the strange, calm beauty I had seen carved in the faces of the moving statues in the gardens of the House Absolute, but differing from that as the face of a living woman differs from her own life mask.
“Did you not ever think, Severian,” she said, “that he who wore a mask might wear another? But I who wore the two do not wear three. No more untruths divide us now, I swear. Touch, Liege — your fingers on my face.”
I was afraid, but she took my hand and lifted it to her cheek. It felt cool and yet living, the very opposite of the dry heat of the doctor’s skin.
“All of the monstrous masks you’ve seen us wear are but your fellow citizens of Urth. An insect, lamprey, now a dying leper. All are your brothers, though you may recoil.”
We were already close to the uppermost level of the tower, treading charred wood at times — the ruin left by the conflagration that had driven forth Baldanders and his physician. When I took my hand away, Famulimus put on her mask again. “Why do you do this?” I asked.
“So that your folk will hate and fear us all. How long, Severian, if we did not, would common men abide a reign not ours? We would not rob your race of your own rule; by sheltering your kind from us, does not your Autarch keep the Phoenix Throne?”
I felt as I sometimes had in the mountains on waking from a dream, when I sat up wondering, looked about and saw the green moon pinned to the sky with a pine, and the frowning, solemn faces of the mountains beneath their broken diadems instead of the dreamed-of walls of Master Palaemon’s study, or our refectory, or the corridor of cells where I sat at the guard table outside Thecla’s door. I managed to say, “Then why did you show me?”
And she answered, “Though you see us, we will not see you more. Our friendship here begins and ends, I fear. Call it a gift of welcome from departing friends.”
Then the doctor, ahead of us, threw open a door, and the drumming of the rain became a roaring, and I felt the cold, deathlike air of the tower invaded by icy but living air from outside. Baldanders had to stoop and turn his shoulders to pass the doorway, and I was struck by the realization that in time he would be unable to do so, whatever care he received from Dr. Talos — the door would have to be widened, and the stairs too, perhaps, for if he fell he would surely perish. Then I understood what had puzzled me before: the reason for the huge rooms and high ceilings of this, his tower. And I wondered what the vaults in the rock were like, where he confined his starving prisoners.
XXXV
The Signal
THE SHIP, WHICH from below had appeared to rest upon the structure of the tower itself, did not. Rather it seemed to float half a chain or more above us — too high to provide much shelter from the lashing rain that made the smooth curve of its hull gleam like black nacre. As I stared up at it, I could not help but speculate on the sails such a vessel might spread to catch the winds that blow between the worlds; and then, just as I was wondering if the crew did not ever peer down to see us, the mermen, the strange, uncouth beings who for a time walked the bottom below their hull, one of them indeed came down, head foremost like a squirrel, wreathed in orange light and clinging to the hull with hands and feet, though it was wet as any stone in a river and polished like the blade of Terminus Est. He wore such a mask as I have often described, but I now knew it to be one. When he saw Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus below, he descended no farther, and in a moment a slender line, glowing orange too so that it seemed a thread of light, was cast down from somewhere above.
“Now we must go,” Ossipago told Baldanders, and he handed him the Claw. “Think well on all the things we have not told you, and remember what you have not been shown.”
“I will,” Baldanders said, his voice as grim as I was ever to hear it.
Then Ossipago caught the line and slid up it until it bent around the curve of the hull and he disappeared from sight. But it somehow seemed that he did not in fact slide up, but down, as if that ship were a world itself and drew everything belonging to it to itself with a blind hunger, as Urth does; or perhaps it was only that he was become lighter than our air, like a sailor who dives from his ship into the sea, and rose as I had risen after I leaped from the hetman’s boat.
However that may be, Barbatus and Famulimus followed him. Famulimus waved just as the swell of the hull blocked her from view; no doubt the doctor and Baldanders thought she bade them farewell; but I knew she had waved to me. A sheet of rain struck my face, blinding my eyes despite my hood.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the ship lifted and receded, vanishing not upwards or to the north or the south or the east or west, but dwindling into a direction to which I could no longer point when it was gone. Baldanders turned to me. “You heard them.” I did not understand, and said, “I spoke with them; yes. Dr. Talos invited me to when he opened the door in the wall for me.”
“They told me nothing. They have shown me nothing.”
“To have seen their ship,” I said, “and to have spoken to them — surely those things are not nothing.”
“They are driving me forward. Always forward. They drive me as an ox to slaughter.”
He went to the battlement and stared out over the vast expanse of the lake, whose rain-churned waters made it seem a sea of milk. The merlons were several spans higher than my head, but he put his hands on them as upon a railing, and I saw the blue gleam of the Claw in one closed fist. Dr. Talos pulled at my cloak, murmuring that it would be better if we were to go inside out of the storm, but I would not leave.
“It began long before you were born. At first they helped me, though it was only by suggesting thoughts, asking questions. Now they only hint. Now they only let slip enough to tell me a certain thing may be done. Tonight there was not even that.”
Wanting to urge that he no longer take the islanders for his experiments, but without knowing how to do so, I said that I had seen his explosive bullets, which were surely very wonderful, a very great achievement. “Natrium,” he said, and turned to face me, his huge head lifted to the dark sky. “You know nothing. Natrium is a mere elemental substance spawned by the sea in endless profusion. Do you think I’d have given it to the
fishermen if it were more than a toy? No, I am my own great work. And I am my only great work!”
Dr. Talos whispered, “Look about you — don’t you recognize this? It is just as he says!”
“What do you mean?” I whispered in return.
“The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark, our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind’s dreams.”
“You’re mad,” I said. “Or joking.”
“Mad?” Baldanders rumbled. “You are mad. You with your fantasies of theurgy. How they must be laughing at us. They think all of us barbarians… I, who have labored three lifetimes.”
He extended his arm and opened his hand. The Claw blazed for him now. I reached for it, and with a sudden motion he threw it. How it flashed in the rain-swept dark! It was as if bright Skuld herself had fallen from the night sky.
I heard the yell, then, of the lake people who waited outside the wall. I had given them no signal; yet the signal had been given by the only act, save perhaps for an attack on my person, that could have induced me to give it. Terminus Est left her sheath while the wind still carried their battle cry. I lifted her to strike, but before I could close with the giant, Dr. Talos sprang between us. I thought the weapon he raised to parry was only his cane; if my heart had not been torn by the loss of the Claw, I would have laughed as I hewed it. My blade rang on steel, and though it drove his own back upon himself he was able to contain the blow. Baldanders rushed past me before I could recover and dashed me against the parapet.
I could not dodge the doctor’s thrust, but he was deceived, I think, by my fuligin cloak, and though his point grazed my ribs, it rattled on stone. I clubbed him with the hilt and sent him reeling.
Baldanders was nowhere to be seen. After a moment I realized that his headlong charge must have been for the door behind me, and the blow he had given me no more than an afterthought, as a man intent on other things may snuff a candle before he leaves the room.
