Shadow & Claw

by Wolfe, Gene

  “I was imprisoned in the antechamber,” I said. “And so lost time.”

  “But you escaped, I see. It isn’t likely you’d be released before my man came to search it. It’s well you did—there isn’t much time left … the three days of the thiasus, then I must go. Come, and I will show you the way to the Garden, though I am by no means sure you will be permitted to enter.”

  He opened the door by which he had come in, and this time I saw that it was not truly rectangular. The room beyond was hardly larger than the one we had left; but its angles seemed normal, and it was richly furnished.

  “You came to the correct part of the Secret House at least,” the androgyne said. “Otherwise we would have had to walk a weary way. Your pardon, while I read the message you brought.”

  He crossed to what I at first supposed was a glass-topped table, and put the steel under it on a shelf. At once a light kindled, shining down from the glass, though there was no light above it. The steel grew until it seemed a sword, and its striations, in place of mere teeth on which to strike sparks from a flint, I saw to be lines of flowing script.

  “Stand back,” the androgyne said. “If you have not read this before, you must not read it now.”

  I did as he bid, and for some time watched him bending over the little object I had carried away from Vodalus’s glade. At last he said, “There is no help for it then … we must fight on two flanks. But this is none of your affair. Do you see that cabinet with the eclipse carved in its door? Open it and lift down the book you find there. Here, you may put it on this stand.”

  Although I feared some trap, I opened the door of the cabinet he had indicated. It held one monstrous book—a thing nearly as tall as I and a good two cubits wide—that stood with its cover of mottled blue-green leather facing me much as a corpse might had I opened the lid of an upright casket. Sheathing my sword, I gripped this great volume with both hands and placed it on the stand. The androgyne asked if I had seen it previously, and I told him I had not.

  “You looked fearful of it, and tried … as it appeared to me … to keep your face from it when you carried it.” He threw back the cover as he spoke. The first page, thus revealed, was written in red in a character I did not know. “This is a warning to the seekers of the path,” he said. “Shall I read it to you?”

  I blurted, “It seemed to me that I saw a dead man in the leather, and that he was myself.”

  He closed the cover again and ran his hand over it. “These pavonine dyeings are but the work of craftsmen long gone … the lines and swirls beneath them, only the scars of the suffering animals’ backs, the marks of ticks and whips. But if you are fearful, you need not go.”

  “Open it,” I said. “Show me the map.”

  “There is no map. This is the thing itself,” he said, and with that he threw back the cover and the first page as well.

  I was blinded, almost, as I have been on dark nights by a discharge of lightning. The inner pages seemed of pure silver, beaten and polished, that caught every wisp of illumination in the room and flung it back amplified a hundred times. “They’re mirrors,” I said, and in saying it realized that they were not, but those things for which we have no word but mirrors, those things that less than a watch before had returned Jonas to the stars. “But how can they have power, when they do not face each other?”

  The androgyne answered, “Consider how long they faced each other when the book was closed. Now the field will withstand the tension we put on it for some time. Go, if you dare.”

  I did not dare. As he spoke, something shaped itself in shining air above the open pages. It was neither a woman nor a butterfly, but it partook of both, and just as we know when we look at the painted figure of a mountain in the background of some picture that it is in reality as huge as an island, so I knew that I saw the thing only from far off—its wings beat, I think, against the proton winds of space, and all Urth might have been a mote disturbed by their motion. Then as I had seen it, so it saw me, much as the androgyne a moment before had seen the swirls and loops of writing on the steel through his glass. It paused and turned to me and opened its wings that I might observe them. They were marked with eyes.

  The androgyne closed the book with a crash, like a door slammed shut. “What did you see?” he asked.

  I could think only that I no longer had to look into the pages, and said, “Thank you, sieur. Whoever you may be, I am your servant from this time forward.”

  He nodded. “Perhaps sometime I may remind you of that. But I will not ask you again what it was you saw. Here, wipe your forehead. The sight has marked you.”

  He handed me a clean cloth as he spoke, and I wiped my brow with it as he told me, because I could feel the moisture running down my face. When I looked at the cloth, it was crimson with blood.

  As though he had read my thoughts, he said, “You are not wounded. The physicians’ term is haematidrosis, I believe. Under the stress of strong emotion, minute veins in the skin of the afflicted part … of the skin everywhere, sometimes … rupture during a profuse sweating. You will have a nasty bruise there, I’m afraid.”

  “Why did you do that?” I asked. “I thought you were going to show me a map. I only want to find the Green Room, as old Rudesind out there says it’s called, where the players are quartered. Did Vodalus’s message say you were to kill the bearer?” I was fumbling for my sword as I spoke, but when my hands gripped the familiar hilt, I found I was too weak to draw the blade.

  The androgyne laughed. It was pleasant laughter at first, wavering somewhere between a woman’s and a boy’s, but it trailed off into tittering, as a drunken man’s sometimes does. Thecla’s memories stirred in me; almost, they woke. “Was that all you wished?” he said when he had control of himself again. “You asked me for a light for your candle, and I tried to give you the sun, and now you are burned. The fault was mine … I sought, perhaps, to postpone my time, yet even so I would not have let you travel so far had I not read in the message that you have carried the Claw. And now I am most truly sorry, but I cannot help but laugh. Where will you go, when you have found the Green Room, Severian?”

  “Where you send me. As you remind me, I have sworn service to Vodalus.” (In fact, I feared him, and feared that the androgyne would inform him if I professed disobedience.)

  “But if I have no orders for you? Have you already disposed of the Claw?”

  “I could not,” I said.

  There was a pause. He did not speak.

  “I’ll go to Thrax,” I said. “I have a letter to the archon there; he’s supposed to have work for me. For the honor of my guild, I would like to go.”

  “That is well. How great, in truth, is your love of Vodalus?”

  Again I felt the haft of the ax in my hand. For you others, as I am told, memory dies; mine scarcely dims. The mist that shrouded the necropolis that night blew against my face again, and everything I had felt when I received the coin from Vodalus and watched him walk away to a place where I could not follow returned to me. “I saved him once,” I said.

  The androgyne added. “Then here is what you are to do. You must go to Thrax as you planned, telling everyone … even yourself … that you are going to fill the position that waits you there. The Claw is perilous. Are you aware of it?”

  “Yes. Vodalus told me that if it became known we possess it, we might lose the support of the populace.”

  For a moment the androgyne stood silent again. Then he said, “The Pelerines are in the north. If you are given the opportunity, you must restore the Claw to them.”

  “That is what I had hoped to do.”

  “Good. There is something else you must do as well. The Autarch is here, but long before you reach Thrax he will be in the north too, with the army. If he comes near Thrax, you are to go to him. In time you will discover the way in which you must take his life.”

  His tone betrayed him as much as Thecla’s thoughts. I wanted to kneel, but he clapped his hands, and a bent little man slipped
silently into the room. He wore a cowled habit like a cenobite’s. The Autarch spoke to him, something I was too distracted to understand.

  In all the world, there can be few sights more beautiful than that of the sun at dawn seen through the thousand sparkling waters of the Vatic Fountain. I am no esthete, but my first sight of its dance (of which I had so often heard), must have acted as a restorative. I still recall it for my pleasure, just as I saw it when the cowled servitor opened a door for me—after so many leagues of the contrived corridors of the Second House—and I watched the silver streams trace ideographs across the solar disc.

  “Straight ahead,” the cowled figure murmured. “Follow the path through the Gate of Trees. You will be safe among the players.” The door shut behind me and became the grassy slope of a hillock.

  I stumbled toward the fountain, which refreshed me with windblown spray. I was surrounded by a pavement of serpentine; for a time I stood there, seeking to read my fortune in the dancing shapes, and at last I fumbled in my sabretache for an offering. The praetorians had taken all my money, but while I felt among the few possessions I yet carried there (a flannel, the fragment of whetstone, and a flask of oil for Terminus Est; a comb and the brown book for myself) I spied a coin wedged between the green blocks at my feet. After only a little effort I was able to draw it out—a single asimi, worn so thin that hardly a trace of the imprint remained. With a whispered wish, I threw it into the very center of the fountain. A jet caught it there and tossed it skyward, so that it flashed for a moment before it fell. I began to read the symbols the water made against the sun.

  A sword. That seemed clear enough. I would continue a torturer.

  A rose then, and beneath it a river. I would climb Gyoll as I had planned, since that was the road to Thrax.

  Now angry waves, becoming soon a long, sullen swell. The sea, perhaps; but one could not reach the sea, I thought, by climbing toward the source of the river.

  A rod, a chair, a multitude of towers, and I began to think the oracular powers of the fountain, in which I had never greatly believed, to be wholly false. I turned away; but as I turned, I glimpsed a many-pointed star, growing ever larger.

  Since I have returned to the House Absolute, I have twice revisited the Vatic Fountain. Once I came at the first light, approaching it through the same door through which I first glimpsed it. But I have never again dared to ask it questions.

  My servants, who confess one and all that they have dropped their orichalks into it when the garden was clear of guests, tell me one and all that they have received no true prophecy for their money. Yet I am unsure, recalling the green man, who drove off his visitors with his accounts of their futures. May it not be that these servants of mine, seeing only a lifetime of trays and brooms and ringing bells, reject it? I have asked my ministers as well, who doubtless cast in chrisos by the handful, but their answers are doubtful and mixed.

  It was hard indeed to keep my back to the fountain and its lovely, cryptic messages and walk toward the old sun. Huge as a giant’s face and darkly red it showed as the horizon dropped away. The poplars of the grounds were silhouetted against it, making me think of the figure of Night atop the khan on this western bank of Gyoll, which I had so often seen with the sun behind it at the close of one of our swimming parties.

  Not realizing that I was now deep within the bounds of the House Absolute and well away from the patrols about the periphery, I feared I might be stopped at any moment, and perhaps cast back into the antechamber—whose secret door, I felt sure, would have been discovered and sealed by now. Nothing of the kind occurred. So far as I could see, no one stirred in all the leagues of hedge and velvet lawn, flower and trickling water, except myself. Lilies far taller than I, their star-shaped faces spangled with unshaken dew, overhung the path; its perfect surface showed behind me only the disturbance of my own feet. Nightingales, some free, some suspended from the branches of trees in golden cages, were singing still.

  Once I saw before me, with something of the old feeling of horror, one of the walking statues. Like a colossal man (though it was not a man) too graceful and too slow to be human, it came across a small secretive lawn as if moving to the inaudible notes of some strange processional. I confess I hung back until it had passed, wondering if it could sense me where I stood in the shadow, and if it cared that I stood so.

  Just when I had despaired of finding the Gate of Trees, I saw it. There was no mistaking it. Even as lesser gardeners espalier pears against a wall, the greater gardeners of the House Absolute, who have generations in which to complete their work, had molded the huge limbs of oaks until every twig conformed to an inspiration wholly architectural, and I, walking on the rooftops of the greatest palace of Urth, with not a stone in sight, saw looming to one side that great, green entranceway built of living wood as if of masonry.

  I ran then.

  XXII

  Personifications

  Through the wide, dripping arch of the Gate of Trees I ran, and out onto a broad expanse of grass, now spangled with tents. Somewhere a megathere roared and shook its chain. There seemed to be no other sound. I halted and listened, and the megathere, no longer disturbed by my footfalls, settled back into the death-like sleep of its kind. I could hear the dew running from the leaves, and the faint, interrupted twitter of birds.

  Something else there was as well. A faint whick, whick, quick and irregular, that grew louder as I listened for it. I began to thread a path among the silent tents, following the sound. I must have misjudged it, however, for Dr. Talos saw me before I saw him.

  “My friend! My partner! They are all asleep—your Dorcas and the rest. All but you and I. Over here!”

  He flourished his cane as he spoke; the whick, whick had been his chopping at the heads of flowers.

  “You have rejoined us just in time. Just in time! We perform tonight, and I would have been forced to hire one of these fellows to take your part. I’m delighted to see you! I owe you some money—do you recall? Not much, and between you and I, I think it false. But it is owed just the same, and I always pay.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t recall,” I said, “so it can’t be a great sum. If Dorcas is all right I’m quite willing to forget it, provided you’ll give me something to eat and show me where I can sleep for a couple of watches.”

  The doctor’s sharp nose dipped for an instant to express regret. “Sleep you may have in plenty until the others wake you. But I’m afraid we’ve no food. Baldanders, you know, eats like a fire. The Thiasus Marshal has promised to bring something today for all of us.” He waved his stick vaguely at the irregular city of tents. “But I’m afraid that won’t be before midmorning at the earliest.”

  “It’s probably just as well. I’m really too tired to eat, but if you’ll show me where I can lie down—”

  “What got your head? Never mind—we’ll mask it with greasepaint. This way!” He was already trotting before me. I followed him through a maze of tent ropes to a heliotrope dome. Baldanders’s barrow stood at the door, and at last I felt certain I had found Dorcas again.

  When I woke, it was as though we had never been separated. Dorcas’s delicate loveliness was unchanged; Jolenta’s radiance threw it into shadow as always, yet made me wish, when the three of us were together, that she would leave so that I might rest my eyes on Dorcas. I took Baldanders to one side, an hour or so after we were all awake, and asked him why he had left me in the forest beyond the Piteous Gate.

  “I was not with you,” he said slowly. “I was with my Dr. Talos.”

  “And so was I. We might have sought him together and been of help to each other.”

  There was a long hesitation; I seemed to feel the weight of those dull eyes on my face, and thought in my ignorance what a terrible thing it would be if Baldanders possessed energy and the will to anger. At last he said, “Were you with us when we left the city?”

  “Of course. Dorcas and Jolenta and I were all with you.”

  Another hesitation. “We fo
und you there, then.”

  “Yes, don’t you remember?”

  He shook his head slowly, and I noticed that his thatch of coarse black hair was touched with gray. “I woke one morning and there you were. I was thinking. You left me soon.”

  “The circumstances were different then—we had arranged to meet again.” (I felt a pang of guilt when I recalled that I had never intended to honor that promise.)

  “We have met again,” Baldanders said dully; and then, seeing that the answer failed to satisfy me, added, “There is nothing here real to me but Dr. Talos.”

  “Your loyalty is very commendable, but you might have remembered that he wanted me with him as well as yourself.” I found it impossible to be angry with this dim, gentle giant.

  “We will collect money here in the south, and then we will build again, as we have built before, when they have forgotten.”

  “This is the north. But that’s right, your house was destroyed, wasn’t it?”

  “Burned,” Baldanders said. I could almost see the flames reflected in his eyes. “I am sorry if you came to harm. For so long I have thought only of the castle and my work.”

  I left him sitting there and went to inspect the properties of our theater—not that they seemed in need of it, or that I could have detected any but the most obvious lacks. A number of showmen were gathered around Jolenta, and Dr. Talos drove them away and ordered her to go into the tent. A moment later, I heard the smack of his cane on flesh; he came out grinning but still angry.

  “It isn’t her fault,” I said. “You know how she looks.”

  “Too gaudy. Too gaudy by far. Do you know what I like about you, Sieur Severian? You prefer Dorcas. Where is she, by the way? Have you seen her since you came back?”