Shadow & Claw

by Wolfe, Gene

  A trooper in a hauberk came out to get something from his saddlebag, and I stopped him and asked where I was. He supposed that I meant in what part of the fortress, and pointed out a turret behind which, he said, was the Hall of Justice; then told me that if I would come with him I could probably get something to eat.

  As soon as he spoke, I realized I was famished. I followed him down a dark hallway into a room much lower and darker than the lazaret, where two or three score dimarchi like himself were bent over a midday meal of fresh bread, beef, and boiled greens. My new friend advised me to take a plate and tell the cooks I had been instructed to come here for my dinner. I did so, and though they looked a trifle surprised at my fuligin cloak, they served me without objection.

  If the cooks were incurious, the soldiers were curiosity itself. They asked my name, and where I came from, and what my rank was (for they assumed our guild was organized like the military). They asked where my ax was, and when I told them we used the sword, where that was; and when I explained that I had a woman with me who was watching it, they cautioned me that she might run away with it, and then counseled me to carry out bread for her under my cloak, since she would not be permitted to come where we were to eat. I discovered that all the older men had supported women—camp followers of what is perhaps the most useful and least dangerous kind—at one time or another, though few had them now. They had spent the summer before in fighting in the north and had been sent to winter in Nessus, where they served to maintain order. Now they expected to go north again within a week. Their women had returned to their own villages to live with parents or relatives. I asked if the women would not have preferred to follow them south.

  “Prefer it?” said my friend. “Of course they’d prefer it. But how would they do it? It’s one thing to follow cavalry that’s fighting its way north with army, for that doesn’t make more than a league or two on the best days, and if it clears three in a week, you can bet it will lose two the next. But how would they keep up on the way back to the city? Fifteen leagues a day. And what would they eat on the way? It’s better for them to wait. If a new xenagie comes to our old sector, they’ll have some new men. Some new girls will come too, and some of the old ones drop out, and it gives everyone a chance to change off if they want. I heard they brought in one of you carnifexes last night, but he was nearly dead himself. Have you been to see him?”

  I said I had not.

  “One of our patrols reported him, and when the chiliarch heard of it he sent them back to bring him, seeing we were sure to need one in a day or so. They swear they didn’t touch him, but they had to bring him back on a litter. I don’t know if he’s one of your comrades, but you might want to take a look.”

  I promised I would, and after thanking the soldiers for their hospitality, left them. I was worried about Dorcas, and their questioning, though it was clearly well meant, had made me uneasy. There were too many things I could not explain—how I had come to be injured, for example, if I had admitted I was the man who had been carried in the night before, and where Dorcas had come from. Not really understanding those things myself bothered me at least as much, and I felt, as we always feel when there is a whole sector of our lives that cannot bear light, that no matter how far the last question had been from one of the forbidden subjects, the next would pierce to the heart of it.

  Dorcas was awake and standing by my bed, where someone had left a cup of steaming broth. She was so delighted to see me that I felt happy myself, as though joy were as contagious as a pestilence. “I thought you were dead,” she told me. “You were gone, and your clothes were gone, and I thought they had taken them to bury you in.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “What happened last night?”

  Dorcas became serious at once. I made her sit on the bed with me and eat the bread I had brought and drink the broth while she answered. “You remember fighting with the man who wore that strange helmet, I’m sure. You put on a mask and went into the arena with him, although I begged you not to. Almost at once he hit you in the chest, and you fell. I remember seeing the leaf, a horrible thing like a flatworm made of iron, half in your body and turning red as it drank your blood.

  “Then it fell away. I don’t know how to describe it. It was as though everything I had seen had been wrong. But it wasn’t wrong—I remember what I saw. You got up again, and you looked … I don’t know. As if you were lost, or some part of you was far. away. I thought he was going to kill you at once, but the ephor protected you, saying he had to allow you to get your avern. His was quiet, the way yours had been when you pulled it up in that awful place, but yours had begun to writhe and open its flower—I thought it had been open before, the white thing with the swirl of petals, only now I believe I was thinking too much of roses, and it had not been open at all. There was something underneath, something else, a face like the face poison would have, if poison had a face.

  “You didn’t notice. You picked it up and it began to curl toward you, slowly, as though it were only half awake. But the other man, the hipparch, couldn’t believe what he had seen. He was staring at you, and that woman Agia was shouting to him. And all at once he turned and ran away. The people who were watching didn’t want him to, they wanted to see someone killed. So they tried to stop him, and he …”

  Her eyes were brimming with tears; she turned her head to keep me from seeing them. I said, “He struck several of them with his avern, and I suppose killed them. Then what happened?”

  “It wasn’t just that he struck them. It struck at them, after the first two, like a snake. The ones who were cut with the leaves didn’t die at once, they screamed, and some of them ran and fell and got up and ran again, as if they were blind, knocking other people down. And at last a big man struck him from behind and a woman who had been fighting somewhere else came with a braquemar. She cut the avern—not sidewise but down the stem so it split. Then some of the men held the hipparch and I heard her blade clash on his helmet.

  “You were just standing there. I wasn’t sure you even knew he was gone, and your avern was bending back toward your face. I thought of what the woman had done and hit at it with your sword. It was heavy, so very heavy at first, and then it was hardly heavy at all. But when I slashed down with it I felt as if I could have struck the head from a bison. Only I had forgotten to take off the sheath. But it knocked the avern out of your hand, and I took you and led you away …”

  “Where?” I asked.

  She shivered and dipped a piece of bread in the steaming broth. “I don’t know. I didn’t care. It was just so good to be walking with you, to know I was taking care of you the way you had taken care of me before we got the avern. But I was cold, terribly cold, when night came. I put your cloak all around you and fastened it in front, and you didn’t seem to be cold, so I took this mantle and wrapped myself in it. My dress was falling to pieces. It still is.”

  I said, “I wanted to buy you another one when we were at the inn.”

  She shook her head, chewing the tough crust. “Do you know, I think this is the first food I’ve had in a long, long time. I have pains in my stomach—that’s why I drank the wine there—but this makes it feel better. I hadn’t realized how weak I was getting.

  “But I didn’t want a new dress from there because I would have had to wear it for a long time, and it would always have reminded me of that day. You can buy me a dress now, if you like, because it will remind me of this day, when I thought you were dead when you were really well.

  “Anyway, we got back into the city somehow. I was hoping to find a place to stop where you could lie down, but there were only big houses with terraces and balustrades. That sort of thing. Some soldiers came galloping up and asked if you were a carnifex. I didn’t know the word, but I remembered what you had told me and so I told them you were a torturer, because soldiers have always seemed to me to be a kind of torturer and I knew they would help us. They tried to get you to ride, but you fell off. So some of them tied their capes between
two lances and laid you on that, and put the ends of the lances in the stirrup straps of two destriers. One of them wanted to take me up into his saddle, but I wouldn’t do it. I walked beside you all the way and sometimes I talked to you, but I don’t think you heard me.”

  She drained the last of the broth. “Now I want to ask you a question. When I was washing myself behind the screen, I could hear you and Agia whispering about a note. Later you were looking for someone in the inn. Will you tell me about that?”

  “Why didn’t you ask before?”

  “Because Agia was with us. If you had found out anything, I didn’t want her to hear what it was.”

  “I’m sure Agia could discover anything I discovered,” I said. “I don’t know her well, and in fact I don’t feel I know her as well as I know you. But I know her well enough to realize that she’s much cleverer than I am.”

  Dorcas shook her head again. “She’s the sort of woman who’s good at making puzzles for other people, but not at solving ones she didn’t make herself. I think she thinks—I don’t know—sidewise. So no one else can follow it. She’s the kind of woman people say thinks like a man, but those women don’t think like real men at all, in fact, they think less like real men than most women do. They just don’t think like women. The way they do think is hard to follow, but that doesn’t mean it’s clear, or deep.”

  I told her about the note, and what it said, and mentioned that although it had been destroyed I had copied it out on the inn’s paper and found it to be the same paper, and the same ink.

  “So someone wrote it there,” she said pensively. “Probably one of the inn servants, because he called the ostler by name. But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can tell you why it was put where it was. I sat there, on that horn settee, before you sat down. It made me happy, I recall, because you sat beside me. Do you remember if the waiter—he must have carried the note, whether he wrote it or not—put the tray there before I got up to bathe?”

  “I can remember everything,” I said, “except last night. Agia sat in a folding canvas chair, you sat on the couch, that’s right, and I sat down beside you. I had been carrying the avern on the pole as well as my sword, and I laid the avern flat behind the couch. The kitchen girl came in with water and towels for you, then she went out and got oil and rags for me.”

  Dorcas said, “We ought to have given her something.”

  “I gave her an orichalk to bring the screen. That’s probably as much as she’s paid for a week. Anyway, you went behind it, and a moment later the host led the waiter in with the tray and wine.”

  “That’s why I didn’t see it, then. But the waiter must have known where I was sitting, because there was no place else. So he left it under the tray, hoping I’d see it when I came out. What was the first part again?”

  “‘The woman with you has been here before. Do not trust her.’”

  “It must have been for me. If it had been for you, it would have distinguished between Agia and me, probably by hair color. And if it had been meant for Agia, it would have been out on the other side of the table where she would have seen it instead.”

  “So you reminded someone of his mother.”

  “Yes.” Once more there were tears in her eyes.

  “You’re not old enough to have had a child who could have written that note.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and buried her face in the loose folds of the brown mantle.

  XXIX

  Agilus

  When the physician in charge had examined me and found I had no need of treatment, he asked us to leave the lazaret, where my cloak and sword were, as he said, upsetting to his patients.

  On the opposite side of the building in which I had eaten with the troopers, we found a shop that catered to their needs. Together with false jewelry and trinkets of the sort such men give their paramours, it carried a certain amount of women’s clothing; and though my money had been much depleted by the dinner we had never returned to the Inn of Lost Loves to enjoy, I was able to buy Dorcas a simar.

  The entrance to the Hall of Justice was not far from this shop. A crowd of a hundred or so was milling before it, and since the people pointed and elbowed one another when they caught sight of my fuligin, we retreated again to the courtyard where the destriers were tethered. A portreeve from the Hall of Justice found us there—an imposing man with a high, white forehead like the belly of a pitcher. “You are the carnifex,” he said. “I was told you are well enough to perform your office.”

  I told him I could do whatever was necessary today, if his master required it.

  “Today? No, no, that’s not possible. The trial won’t be over until this afternoon.”

  I remarked that since he had come to make certain I was well enough to carry out the execution, he must have felt certain the prisoner would be found guilty.

  “Oh, there’s no question of that—not the least. Nine persons died, after all, and the man was apprehended on the spot. He’s of no consequence, so there’s no possibility of pardon or appeal. The tribunal will reconvene at midmorning, but you won’t be required until noon.”

  Because I had had no direct experience with judges or courts (at the Citadel, our clients had always been sent to us, and Master Gurloes dealt with those officials who occasionally came to inquire about the disposition of some case or other), and because I was eager to actually perform the act in which I had been drilled for so long, I suggested that the chiliarch might wish to consider a torchlight ceremony that same night.

  “That would be impossible. He must meditate his decision. How would it look? A great many people feel already that the military magistrates are hasty and even capricious. And to be frank, a civil judge would probably have waited a week, and the case would be all the better for it, since there would have been ample time, then, for someone to come forward with fresh evidence, which of course no one will actually do.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon then,” I said. “We’ll require quarters for the night. Also I’ll want to examine the scaffold and block, and ready my client. Will I need a pass to see him?”

  The portreeve asked if we could not stay in the lazaret, and when I shook my head, we—the portreeve, Dorcas, and I—went there to permit him to argue with the physician in charge, who, as I had predicted, refused to have us. That was followed by a lengthy discussion with a noncommissioned officer of the xenagie, who explained that it was impossible for us to stay in the barracks with the troopers, and that if we were to use one of the rooms set aside for the higher ranks, no one would want to occupy it in the future. In the end a little, windowless storeroom was cleared out for us, and two beds and some other furniture (all of which had seen hard use) brought in. I left Dorcas there, and after assuring myself that I was unlikely to step through a rotten board at the critical moment, or to have to saw the client’s head off while I held him across my knee, I went to the cells to make the call that our traditions demand.

  Subjectively at least, there is a great difference between detention facilities to which one has become accustomed and those to which one has not. If I had been entering our own oubliette, I would have felt I was, quite literally, coming home—perhaps coming home to die, but coming home nevertheless. Although I would have realized in the abstract that our winding metal corridors and narrow gray doors might hold horror for the men and women confined there, I would have felt nothing of that horror myself, and if one of them had suggested I should, I would have been quick to point out their various comforts—clean sheets and ample blankets, regular meals, adequate light, privacy that was scarcely ever interrupted, and so on.

  Now, going down a narrow and twisted stone stair into a facility a hundredth the size of ours, my feelings were precisely the reverse of what I would have felt there. I was oppressed by the darkness and stench as if by a weight. The thought that I might myself be confined there by some accident (a misunderstood order, for example, or some unsuspected malice on t
he part of the portreeve) recurred no matter how often I pushed it aside.

  I heard the sobbing of a woman, and because the portreeve had spoken of a man, assumed that it came from a cell other than the one that held my client. That, I had been told, was the third from the right. I counted: one, two, and three. The door was merely wood bound with iron, but the locks (such is military efficiency!) had been oiled. Within, the sobbing hesitated and almost ceased as the bolt fell back.

  Inside a naked man lay upon straw. A chain ran from the iron collar about his neck to the wall. A woman, naked too, bent over him, her long, brown hair falling past her face and his so that it seemed to unite them. She turned to look at me, and I saw that it was Agia.

  She hissed, “Agilus!” and the man sat up. Their faces were so nearly alike that Agia might have been holding a mirror to her own.

  “It was you,” I said. “But that isn’t possible.” Even while I spoke, I was recalling the way Agia had behaved at the Sanguinary Field, and the strip of black I had seen by the hipparch’s ear.

  “You,” Agia said. “Because you lived, he has to die.”

  I could only answer, “Is it really Agilus?”

  “Of course.” My client’s voice was an octave lower than his twin’s, though less steady. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

  I could only shake my head.

  “It was Agia in the shop. In the Septentrion costume. She came in through the rear entrance while I was speaking to you, and I made a sign to her when you wouldn’t even talk of selling the sword.”

  Agia said, “I couldn’t speak—you would have known it for a woman’s voice—but the cuirass hid my breasts and the gauntlets my hands. Walking like a man isn’t as hard as men think.”

  “Have you ever looked at that sword? The tang should be signed.” Agilus’s hands lifted for a moment, as though he would have taken it still if he could. Agia added in a toneless voice, “It is. By Jovinian. I saw it in the inn.”