Shadow & Claw

by Wolfe, Gene

  “I warn you, Doctor. Don’t strike her.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I’m only afraid she may be lost.”

  His surprised expression convinced me that he was telling the truth. I told him, “We only got to talk for a moment. She’s gone to fetch water.”

  “That’s courageous of her,” he said, and when I looked puzzled he added, “She’s afraid of it. Surely you’ve noticed. She’s clean, but even when she washes, the water is only thumb deep; when we cross bridges, she holds onto Jolenta and trembles.”

  Dorcas returned then, and if the doctor said anything more I did not hear it. When she and I had met that morning, neither of us had been able to do much more than smile, and touch with incredulous hands. Now she came to me, putting down the pails she carried, and seemed to devour me with her eyes. “I have missed you so,” she said. “I’ve been so lonely without you.”

  I laughed to think of anyone missing me, and held up the edge of my fuligin cloak. “You missed this?”

  “Death, you mean. Did I miss death? No, I missed you.” She took the cloak from my hand and used it to draw me toward the line of poplars that formed one wall of the Green Room. “There is a bench I found where there are beds of herbs. Come and sit with me. They can spare us for a while after so many days, and eventually Jolenta will come out and find the water, which was for her anyway.”

  As soon as we were away from the bustle of the tents, where jugglers tossed their knives and acrobats their children, we were wrapped in the stillness of the gardens. They are perhaps the largest tract of land anywhere planned and planted for beauty, save for those wildernesses that are the gardens of the Increate and whose cultivators are invisible to us. Overlapping hedges formed a narrow door. We passed into a grove of trees with white, perfumed boughs that reminded me sadly of the flowering plums through which the praetorians had dragged Jonas and me, though those had seemed planted for ornament, and these, I thought, for the sake of their fruit. Dorcas had broken a twig bearing half a dozen of the blossoms and thrust it into her pale golden hair.

  Beyond the orchard was a garden so old that I felt sure it had been forgotten by everyone save the servants who tended it. The stone seat there had been carved with heads, but they had worn away until they were almost featureless. A few beds of simple flowers remained, and with them fragrant rows of kitchen herbs—rosemary, angelica, mint, basil, and rue, all growing in a soil black as chocolate from the labor of countless years.

  There was a little stream too, where Dorcas had no doubt drawn her water. Its source may once have been a fountain—now it was only a species of spring, rising in a shallow stone bowl to splash over the lip and eventually wind its way through little canals lined with rough masonry to water the fruit trees. We sat in the stone seat, I leaned my sword against its arm, and she took my hands in hers.

  “I am afraid, Severian,” she said. “I have such terrible dreams.”

  “Since I’ve been gone?”

  “All the time.”

  “When we slept side by side in the field, you told me you had awakened from a good dream. You said it was very detailed and seemed real.”

  “If it was good, I have forgotten it now.”

  I had already noticed that she was careful to keep her eyes away from the water spilling from the ruined fountain.

  “Every night, I dream I am walking through streets of shops. I am happy, or at least content. I have money to spend, and there is a long list of things I wish to buy. Again and again I recite the list to myself, and I try to decide in what parts of the quarter I can get each in the best quality for the lowest price.

  “But gradually, as I go from shop to shop, I grow aware that everyone who sees me hates me and holds me in contempt, and I am aware that it is because they believe me to be an unclean spirit who has wrapped itself in the woman’s body they see. At last I enter a tiny shop conducted by an old man and an old woman. She sits making lace while he spreads their wares on the counter for me. I hear the sound her thread makes behind me as it is pulled through the work.”

  I asked, “What is it you have come to buy?”

  “Tiny clothes.” Dorcas held her small, white hands half a span apart. “Doll’s clothing, perhaps. I particularly remember little shirts of fine wool. At last I choose one and hand the old man money. But it is not money at all—only a lump of filth.”

  Her shoulders were shaking, and I put my arm about her to comfort her.

  “I want to scream then that they are wrong, that I am not the foul specter they take me for. Yet I know that if I do, whatever I may say will be taken as the final proof that they are right, and the words choke me. The worst part is that just then the hissing of the thread stops.” She had taken my free hand again, and now she gripped it as though to drive her meaning into me. “I know that no one could understand who has not had the same dream, but it is terrible. Terrible.”

  “Perhaps now that I am here with you again, these dreams will end.”

  “And then I sleep, or at least fall into blackness. If I do not wake then, there is a second dream. I am in a boat poled across a spectral lake—”

  “There is no mystery in that, at least,” I said. “You rode in such a boat with Agia and me. It belonged to a man named Hildegrin. Surely you must remember that trip.”

  Dorcas shook her head. “It is not that boat but a much smaller one. An old man poles it, and I lie at his feet. I am awake, but I cannot move. My arm trails in the black water. Just as we are about to touch shore, I fall from the boat, but the old man does not see me, and as I sink through the water I know that he has never known I was there at all. Soon the light is gone, and I am very cold. Far above me, I hear a voice I love calling my name, but I cannot remember whose voice it is.”

  “It’s my voice, calling to wake you.”

  “Perhaps.” The whip mark Dorcas had carried from the Piteous Gate burned on her cheek like a brand.

  For a while we sat without speaking. The nightingales were silent now, but linnets were singing in all the trees, and I saw a parrot, clad in scarlet and green like a little messenger in livery, flash among the branches.

  At last Dorcas said, “What a frightful thing water is. I should not have brought you here, but it was the only place nearby where I could think to go. I wish we had sat on the grass under those trees.”

  “Why do you hate it? It seems beautiful to me.”

  “Because it is here in the sunshine, but by its own nature it runs down and down forever, away from the light.”

  “But it rises again,” I said. “The rain we see in spring is the same water we saw running the gutters the year before. Or so Master Malrubius taught us.”

  Dorcas’s smile flashed like a star. “That is good to believe, whether it’s true or not. Severian, it’s silly for me to say you’re the best person I know, because you’re the only good person I know. But I think if I met a thousand others, you would still be the best. That was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “If you need my protection, you have it. You know that.”

  “It isn’t that at all,” Dorcas said. “In a way I want to give you mine. Now that sounds silly, doesn’t it? I have no family, I have no one except you, and yet I think I can protect you.”

  “You know Jolenta, and Dr. Talos and Baldanders.”

  “They are no one. Don’t you feel that, Severian? Even I am no one, but they are less than I. The five of us were in the tent last night, and yet you were alone. You told me once that you don’t have much imagination, but you must have sensed that.”

  “Is that what you want to protect me from—loneliness? I would welcome such protection.”

  “Then I will give you all I can, for as long as I can. But most of all, I want to protect you from the opinion of the world. Severian, do you remember what I told you of my dream? How all the people in the shops, and on the street, believed that I was only some hideous ghost? They may be right.”

  She was shaking, and I held her.
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  “That is part of the reason the dream is so painful. The other part comes from knowing that in some other way they are wrong. The foul specter is in me. It is me. But there are other things in me too, and they are what I am as much as it is.”

  “You could never be a foul specter, or anything foul.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said seriously, and looked up at me. Her small, tilted face was never more beautiful than it was then in the sunlight, or more pure. “Oh, yes I could, Severian. Just as you can be what they call you. What you sometimes are. Do you remember how we saw the cathedral leap into the sky and burn away in an instant? And how we went walking down a road between trees until we saw a light ahead, and it was Dr. Talos and Baldanders, ready to put on their show with Jolenta?”

  “You held my hand,” I said. “And we talked about philosophy. How could I forget?”

  “When we came to the light and Dr. Talos saw us—do you remember what he said?”

  I cast my mind back to that evening, the end of the day on which I had executed Agilus. In memory I heard the roar of the crowd, Agia’s scream, and then the roll of Baldanders’s drum. “He said that everyone had come now, and that you were Innocence, and I was Death.”

  Dorcas nodded solemnly. “That’s right. But you’re not really Death, you know, no matter how often he calls you that. You’re no more Death than a butcher is because he cuts the throats of steers all day. To me you’re Life, and you’re a young man named Severian, and if you wanted to put on different clothes and become a carpenter or a fisherman, no one could stop you.”

  “I have no desire to leave my guild.”

  “But you could. Today. That’s the thing to remember. People don’t want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in, but I don’t want you to let them lock you in. Dr. Talos is worse than most. In his own way, he’s a liar …”

  She left the accusation unfinished, and I ventured, “I once heard Baldanders say he seldom lied.”

  “In his own way, I said. Baldanders is right, Dr. Talos doesn’t lie the way other people understand lying. Calling you Death wasn’t a lie, it was a … a …”

  “Metaphor,” I suggested.

  “But it was a dangerous, bad metaphor, and it was aimed at you like a lie.”

  “Do you think Dr. Talos hates me, then? I would have said he was one of the few people who’ve showed me real kindness since I left the Citadel. You, Jonas—who’s gone now—an old woman I met while I was imprisoned, a man in a yellow robe—who also called me Death, by the way—and Dr. Talos. It’s a short list, actually.”

  “I don’t think he hates in the way we understand it,” Dorcas replied softly. “Or for that matter, that he loves. He wants to manipulate everything he comes upon, to change it with his will. And since tearing down is easier than building, that’s what he does most often.”

  “Baldanders seems to love him, though,” I said. “I used to have a crippled dog, and I’ve seen Baldanders look at the doctor the way Triskele used to look at me.”

  “I understand you, but it doesn’t strike me that way. Have you ever thought of how you must have looked, when you looked at your dog? Do you know anything about their past?”

  “Only that they lived together near Lake Diurturna. The people there appear to have set fire to their house to drive them away.”

  “Do you think Dr. Talos could be Baldanders’s son?”

  The idea was so absurd that I laughed, happy to have the release from tension.

  “Just the same,” Dorcas said, “that’s how they act. Like a slow-thinking, hard-working father with a brilliant, erratic son. At least so it seems to me.”

  It was not until we had left the bench and were walking back to the Green Room (which no more resembled the picture Rudesind had shown me than any other garden would have) that it occurred to me to wonder whether Dr. Talos’s calling Dorcas “Innocence” had not been a metaphor of the same kind.

  XXIII

  Jolenta

  The old orchard and the herb garden beyond it had been so silent, so freighted with oblivion, that they had recalled to me the Atrium of Time, and Valeria with her exquisite face framed in furs. The Green Room was pandemonium. Everyone was awake now, and sometimes it seemed that everyone was shouting. Children climbed the trees to free the caged birds, pursued by their mothers’ brooms and their fathers’ missiles. Tents were being struck even while rehearsals continued, so that I saw a seemingly solid pyramid of striped canvas collapse like a flag thrown down and reveal beyond it the grass-green megathere rearing on his hind legs while a dancer pirouetted on his forehead.

  Baldanders and our tent were gone, but in a moment Dr. Talos came rushing up and hurried us away down twisted walks, past balustrades and waterfalls and grottoes filled with raw topazes and flowering moss, to a bowl of clipped lawn where the giant labored to erect our stage under the eyes of a dozen white deer.

  It was to be a much more elaborate stage than the one I had played upon within the Wall of Nessus. Servants from the House Absolute, it seemed, had brought timbers and nails, tools and paint and cloth in quantities much greater than we could possibly make use of. Their generosity had waked the doctor’s bent toward the grandoise (which never slumbered deeply) and he alternated between assisting Baldanders and me with the heavier constructions and making frantic additions to the manuscript of his play.

  The giant was our carpenter, and though he moved slowly, he worked so steadily, and with such great strength—driving a spike as thick as my forefinger with a blow or two and cutting a timber it would have taken me a watch to saw through with a few strokes of his ax—that he might have been ten slaves toiling under the whip.

  Dorcas found a talent for painting that I at least was surprised by. Together, we erected the black plates that drink the sun, not only to gather energy for the night’s performance, but to power the projectors now. These contrivances can provide a backdrop of a thousand leagues as easily as the interior of a hut, but the illusion is complete only in total darkness. It is best, therefore, to strengthen it with painted scenes behind, and Dorcas created those with skill, standing waist high in mountains as she thrust her brushes through the daylight-faded images.

  Jolenta and I were of less value. I had no painter’s hand, and too little understanding of the necessities of the play even to assist the doctor in arranging our properties. Jolenta, I think, rebelled physically and psychically against any kind of work, and certainly against this. Those long legs, so slender below the knees, so rounded to bursting above them, were inadequate to bear much weight beyond that of her own body; her jutting breasts were in constant danger of having their nipples crushed between lumber or smeared with paint. Nor had she any of that spirit that animates the members of a group forwarding the group’s purpose. Dorcas had said that I had been alone the night before, and perhaps she had been more nearly correct than I supposed, but Jolenta was more solitary still. Dorcas and I had each other, Baldanders and the doctor their crooked friendship, and we came together in the performance of the play. Jolenta had only herself, the incessant performance whose sole goal was to garner admiration.

  She touched my arm, and without speaking rolled enormous emerald eyes to indicate the edge of our natural amphitheater, where a grove of chestnuts lifted white candles among their pale leaves.

  I saw that none of the others were looking at us and nodded. After Dorcas, Jolenta walking beside me seemed nearly as tall as Thecla, though she took small steps instead of Thecla’s swinging strides. She was a head taller than Dorcas at least, her coiffure made her seem taller still, and she wore boots with high, riding heels.

  “I want to see it,” she said. “It’s the only chance I shall ever have.”

  That was a palpable lie, but as though I believed it I said, “The opportunity is symmetric. Today and only today the House Absolute has the opportunity to see you.”

  She nodded; I had enunciated a profound truth. “I need someone—someone the ones I don’t wa
nt to talk to will be afraid of. I mean all these showmen and mummers. When you were gone, no one but Dorcas would go with me, and no one is afraid of her. Could you draw that sword and carry it over your shoulder?”

  I did so.

  “If I don’t smile, make them leave. Understand?”

  Grass much longer than that in the natural amphitheater, but softer than fern, grew among the chestnuts; the path was of quartz pebbles shot with gold.

  “If only the Autarch saw me, he would desire me. Do you think he will come to our play?”

  To please her I nodded, but added, “I have heard he has little use for women, however beautiful, save as advisors, spies, and shield maids.”

  She stopped and turned, smiling. “That’s just it. Don’t you see? I can make anyone desire me, and so he, the One Autarch, whose dreams are our reality, whose memories are our history, will desire me too, unmanned or not. You have wanted women other than me, haven’t you? Wanted them badly?”

  I admitted I had.

  “And so you think you desire me as you wished for them.” She turned and began to walk again, hobbling a little, as it seemed she always did, but invigorated for the moment by her own argument. “But I make every man stiffen and every woman itch. Women who have never loved women wish to love me—did you know that? The same ones come to our performances again and again, and send me their food and their flowers, scarfs, shawls, and embroidered kerchiefs with oh, such sisterly, motherly notes. They’re going to protect me, protect me from my physician, from his giant, from their husbands and sons and neighbors. And the men! Baldanders has to throw them in the river.”

  I asked if she were lame, and as we emerged from the chestnuts, I looked about for some conveyance for her, but there was nothing.

  “My thighs are chafed and it hurts to walk. I have an unguent for them that helps a bit, and a man bought a jennet for me to ride, but I don’t know where it’s pastured now. I’m really only comfortable when I can keep my legs apart.”

  “I could carry you.”