Shadow and Claw

by Gene Wolfe

  "A nephew of mine," the naked man continued, "a member of my own fire circle, had no fish. And so he took up his gowdalie and went to a certain pool. So quietly did he lean over the water he might have been a tree." The naked man leaped up as he said this, and posed his sinewy frame as though to spear the woman's feet with a shaft of air. "Long, long he stood . . . until the monkeys no longer feared him and returned to drop sticks in the water, and the hesperorn fluttered to her nest. A big fish came out of his den in the sunken trunks. My nephew watched him circle, slowly, slowly. He swam near the surface, and then when my nephew was about to drive home the three-toothed spear, there was no longer a fish to be seen, but a lovely woman. At first my nephew thought the fish was the fish-king, who had changed his form that he might not be speared. Then he saw the fish moving beneath the woman's face, and knew that he saw a reflection. He looked up at once, but there was nothing to be seen but the whisk of the vines. The woman was gone!" The naked man looked up, mimicking very well the amazement of the fisherman. "That night my nephew went to the Numen, the Proud One, and slit the throat of a young oreodont, saying-" Agia whispered to me, "In the name of the Theoanthropos, how long do you mean to stay here? This could go on all day."

  "Let me look about the hut," I whispered back, "and we'll go."

  "Mighty is the Proud One, sacred all his names. Everything found beneath leaves is his, the storms are carried in his arms, the poison holds no death unless his curse is pronounced over it!"

  The woman said, "I don't think we need all these praises of your fetish, Isangoma. My husband wishes to hear your story. Very well, but tell it and spare us your litanies."

  "The Proud One protects his supplicant! Would not he be shamed if one who adores him were to die?"

  "Isangoma!"

  From the window, the man said, "He's afraid, Marie. Can't you hear it in his voice?"

  "There is no fear for those who wear the sign of the Proud One! His breath is the mist that hides the infant uakaris from the claws of the margay!"

  "Robert, if you won't do something about this, I will. Isangoma, be silent. Or leave and never return here again."

  "The Proud One knows Isangoma loves the Preceptress. He would save her if he could."

  "Save me from what? Do you think there's one of your dreadful beasts here? If there were, Robert would shoot it with his gun."

  "The tokoloshe, Preceptress. The tokoloshe come. But the Proud One in his condensation will protect us. He is the mighty commander of all tokoloshe! When he roars, they hide beneath the fallen leaves."

  "Robert, I think he's lost his mind."

  "He has eyes, Marie, and you don't."

  "What do you mean by that? And why do you keep looking out that window?" Quite slowly, the man turned to face us. For a moment he looked at Agia and me, then he turned away. His expression was the one I have seen our clients wear when Master Gurloes showed them the instruments to be used in their anacrisis.

  "Robert, for goodness' sake tell me what's wrong with you."

  "As Isangoma says, the tokoloshe are here. Not his, I think, but ours. Death and the Lady. Have you heard of them, Marie?"

  The woman shook her head. She had risen from her seat and opened the lid of a small chest.

  "You wouldn't have, I suppose. It's a picture - an artistic theme, rather. Pictures by several artists. Isangoma, I don't think your Proud One has much authority over these tokoloshe. These come from Paris, where I used to be a student, to remonstrate with me for giving up art for this." The woman said, "You have a fever, Robert. That's obvious. I'm going to give you something, and you'll feel better soon."

  The man looked toward us again, at Agia's face and my own, as though he did not wish to do so but found himself unable to control the motion of his eyes. "If I am ill, Marie, then the diseased know things the well have overlooked. Isangoma knows they're here too, don't forget. Didn't you feel the floor tremble while you were reading to him? That was when they came in, I think."

  "I've just poured you a glass of water so you can swallow your quinine. There are no ripples in it."

  "What are they, Isangoma? Tokoloshe - but what are tokoloshe?"

  "Bad spirits, Preceptor. When man think bad thought or woman do bad thing, there is another tokoloshe. He stay behind. Man think: No one know, everyone dead. But tokoloshe remain until end of world. Then everyone will see, know what that man did."

  The woman said, "What a horrible idea."

  Her husband's hands clenched the yellow stick of the windowsill. "Don't you see they are only the results of what we do? They are the spirits of the future, and we make them ourselves."

  "They are a lot of pagan nonsense, that's what I see, Robert. Listen. Your vision is so sharp, can't you listen for a moment?"

  "I am listening. What do you want to say?"

  "Nothing. I only want you to listen. What do you hear?" The hut fell silent I listened too, and could not have not listened if I had wanted to. Outside the monkeys chattered, and the parrots screamed as before. Then I heard, over the jungle noises, a faint humming, as though an insect as large as a boat were flying far away.

  "What is it?" the man asked.

  "The mail plane. If you're lucky, you should be able to see it soon." The man craned his neck out the window, and I, curious to see what he was looking for, went to the window on his left and looked out as well. The foliage was so thick that at first it seemed impossible to see anything, but he was staring almost straight up past the edge of the thatch, and I found a patch of blue there.

  The humming grew louder. Into view came the strangest flier I have ever seen. It was winged, as if it had been built by some race that had not yet realized that since it would not flap wings like a bird in any case, there was no reason its lift, like a kite's, could not come from its hull. There was a bulbous swelling on each argent pinion, and a third at the front of the hull; the light seemed to glimmer before these swellings.

  "In three days we could be at the landing strip, Robert. The next time it comes, we would be waiting."

  "If the Lord has sent us here-"

  "Yes, Preceptor, we must do what the Proud One wishes! There is none like he!

  Preceptress, let me dance to the Proud One, and sing his song. Then it may be the tokoloshe will depart."

  The naked man snatched her book from the woman and began to beat it with the flat of his hand - rhythmic claps as though he played a tambour. His feet scraped the uneven floor, and his voice, beginning with a melodic stridulation, became the voice of a child:

  "In the night when all is silent,

  Hear him screaming in the treetops!

  See him dancing in the fire!

  He lives in the arrow poison,

  Tiny as a yellow firefly!

  Brighter than a falling star!

  Hairy men walk in the forest-"

  Agia said, "I'm leaving, Severian," and stepped through the doorway behind us.

  "If you want to stay and watch this, you can. But you'll have to get your avern yourself, and find your way to the Sanguinary Fields. Do you know what will happen if you fail to appear?"

  "They'll employ assassins, you said."

  "And the assassins will employ the snake called yellowbeard. Not on you, at first. On your family, if you have any, and your friends. Since I've been with you all over our quarter of the city, that probably means me."

  "He comes when the sun is setting,

  See his feet upon the water!

  Tracks of flame across the water!"

  The chant continued, but the chanter knew we were going: his singsong held a note of triumph. I waited until Agia had reached the ground, then followed her. She said, "I thought you'd never leave. Now that you're here, do you really like this place so much?" The metallic colors of her torn gown seemed as angry as she herself against the cool green of the unnaturally dark leaves.

  "No," I said. "But I find it interesting. Did you see their flier?"

  "When you and the inmate looked out
the windows? I wasn't such a fool."

  "It was like no other I've ever seen. I should have been looking at the roof facets of this building, but instead I saw the flier he expected to see. At least, that's what it seemed like. Something from somewhere else. A little while ago I wanted to tell you about a friend of a friend of mine who was caught in Father Inire's mirrors. She found herself in another world, and even when she returned to Thecla - that was my friend's name - she wasn't quite sure she had found her way back to her real point of origin. I wonder if we aren't still in the world those people left, instead of them in ours." Agia had already started down the path. Flecks of sunlight seemed to turn her brown hair to dark gold as she looked over her shoulder to say, "I told you certain visitors are attracted to certain bioscapes." I trotted to catch up with her.

  "As time goes on, their minds bend to conform to their surroundings, and it may be they bend ours as well. It was probably an ordinary flier you saw."

  "He saw us. So did the savage."

  "From what I've heard, the further an inhabitant's consciousness must be warped, the more residual perceptions are likely to remain. When I meet monsters, wild men, and so forth in these gardens, I find they're a lot more likely to be at least partially aware of me than the others are.

  "Explain the man," I said.

  "I didn't build this place, Severian. All I know is that if you turn around on the path now, that last place we saw probably won't be there. Listen, I want you to promise me that when we get out of here, you'll let me take you straight to the Garden of Endless Sleep. We don't have time left for anything else, not even the Garden of Delectation. And you're not really the kind of person who ought to go sightseeing in here."

  "Because I wanted to stay in the Sand Garden?"

  "Partly, yes. You're going to make trouble for me here sooner or later, I think."

  As she said that, we rounded one of the path's seemingly endless sinuosities. A log tagged with a small white rectangle that could only be a species sign lay across the path, and through the crowding leaves on our left I could see the wall, its greenish glass forming an unobtrusive backdrop for the foliage. Agia had already taken a step past the door when I shifted Terminus Est to the other hand and opened it for her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - DORCAS

  I had first heard of the flower, I had imagined averns would be grown on benches, in rows like those in the conservatory of the Citadel. Later, when Agia had told me more about the Botanic Gardens, I conceived of a place like the necropolis where I had frolicked as a boy, with trees and crumbling tombs, and walkways paved with bones.

  The reality was very different - a dark lake in an infinite fen. Our feet sank in sedge, and a cold wind whistled past with nothing, as it seemed, to stop it before it reached the sea. Rushes grew beside the track on which we walked, and once or twice a water bird passed overhead, black against a misted sky. I had been telling Agia about Thecla. Now she touched my arm. "You can see them from here, though we'll have to go half around the lake to pluck one. Look where I'm pointing . . . that smudge of white."

  "They don't look dangerous from here."

  "They've done for a great many people, I can assure you. Some of them are interred in this garden, I imagine."

  So there were graves after all. I asked where the mausoleums stood.

  "There aren't any. No coffins either, or mortuary urns, or any of that clutter. Look at the water slopping at your boots."

  I did. It was as brown as tea.

  "It has the property of preserving corpses. The bodies are weighed by forcing lead shot down their throats, then sunk here with their positions mapped so they can be fished up again later if anyone wants to look at them." I would readily have sworn that there was no one within a league of where we stood. Or at least (if the segments of the glass building really confined the spaces they enclosed as they were supposed to do) within the borders of the Garden of Endless Sleep. But Agia had no sooner said what she did than the head and shoulders of an old man appeared over the top of some reeds a dozen paces off. " 'Tis not true," he called. "I know they say so, but 'tisn't right." Agia, who had allowed the torn bodice of her gown to hang as it would, quickly drew it up again. "I didn't know I was talking to anyone but my escort here." The old man ignored the rebuke. No doubt his thoughts were already too involved with the remark he had overheard for him to pay much heed. "I've the figure here

  -would you like to see it? You, young sieur - you've an education, anyone can tell that. Will you look?" He appeared to be carrying a staff. I watched its head rise and fall several times before I understood that he was poling toward us.

  "More trouble," Agia said. "We'd better go." I asked if it might not be possible for the old man to ferry us across the lake, thus saving us the long walk around.

  He shook his head. "Too heavy for my little boat. There's but room for Cas and me here. You great folk would capsize us."

  The prow came into sight, and I saw that what he said was true: the skiff was so small it seemed almost too much to ask of it that it keep the old man himself afloat, though he was bowed and shrunken by age (he appeared older even than Master Palaemon) until he could hardly have weighed more than a boy of ten. There was no one in it with him.

  "Your pardon, sieur," he said. "But I can't come no nearer. Wet she may be, but she gets too dry for me, or you couldn't walk upon it. Can you step here by the edge so's I can show you my figure?"

  I was curious to see what it was he wanted of us, so I did as he asked, Agia following me reluctantly.

  "Here now." Reaching into his tunic he pulled out a small scroll. "Here is the position. Have a look, young sieur."

  The scroll was headed with some name and a long description of where this person had lived, whose wife she was, and what her husband had done for a living; all of which I only pretended to glance at, I am afraid. Below the description were a crude map and two numbers.

  "Now you see, sieur, it ought to be easy enough. First number there, that's paces over from the Fulstrum. Second number's paces up. Now would you believe that for all these years I've been trying to find her, and never found her yet?" Looking at Agia, he drew himself up until he stood almost normally.

  "I'd believe it," Agia said. "And if it will satisfy you, I'm sorry to hear it. But it has nothing to do with us."

  She turned to go, but the old man thrust out his pole to prevent my following her. "Don't you heed what they say. They put them where the figure shows, but they don't stay there. Some has been see'd in the river, even." He looked vaguely toward the horizon. "Out there."

  I told him I doubted that was possible.

  "All the water here, where'd you think it come from? There's a conduit underground that brings it, and if it didn't this whole place'd dry out. When they get to moving about, what's to prevent one from swimming through? What's to prevent twenty? Can't be any current to speak of. You and her - you come to get a avern, did you? You know why they planted 'em here to begin with?" I shook my head.

  "For the manatees. They're in the river, and used to swim in through the conduit. It scared the kin to see their faces bobbing in the lake, so Father Inire had the gardeners plant the averns. I was here and saw it. Just a little man he is, with a wry neck and bow legs. If a manatee comes now, those flowers kill it in the night. One morning I come looking for Cas like I always do unless I've something else I have to take care of, and there was two curators on the shore with a harpoon. Dead manatee in the lake, they said. I went out with my hook and got it, and it wasn't no manatee, but a man. He'd spit up his lead, or they hadn't put enough in. Looked as good as you or her, and better than me."

  "Had he been dead long?"

  "No way of telling, for the water here pickles them. You'll hear it said it turns their skin to leather, and so it does. But don't think of the sole of your boot when you hear it. More like a woman's glove."

  Agia was far ahead of us, and I began to walk after her. The old man followed us, poling his skiff parallel to the
floating path of sedge.

  "I told them I'd had better luck in one day for them than I've had in forty years for myself. Here's what I use." He held up an iron grapple on a length of rope. "Not that I haven't caught aplenty, all kinds. But not Cas. I started where the figure showed, year after she died. She wasn't there, so I kept working my way out. After five years of that I was a ways far away - that's what I thought then - from what it said. I got to be afraid she might be there after all, so I begun over. First where it said, then working out. Ten years of that. I got to be afraid again, so what I do now is start in the morning where it says, and make my first cast there. After that I go to where I stopped the last time, and circle out some more. She's not where it says - I know that, I know everyone that's there now, and some of them I've pulled up a hundred times. But she's wandering, and I keep thinking maybe she'll come home."

  "She was your wife?"

  The old man nodded, and to my surprise said nothing.

  "Why do you want to recover her body?"

  Still he said nothing. His pole made no sound as it slipped in and out of the water; the skiff left only the faintest of wakes behind it, tiny ripples that lapped the side of the sedge track like the tongues of kittens.