Sword and Citadel

by Gene Wolfe

Page 10

 

  "There is something in all of us that has always been dead," I said.

  "If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children. "

  "Im going to go back, Severian. I know that now, and thats what Ive been trying to tell you. I have to go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened to me. I know you cant go with me. . . " I nodded.

  "And Im not asking you to. I dont even want you to. I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same. I dont want to take death with me when I go to look for my life. "

  "I understand," I said.

  "My child may still be alive - an old man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to know. "

  "Yes," I said. But I could not help adding, "There was a time when you told me I was not death. That I must not let others persuade me to think of myself in that way. It was behind the orchard on the grounds of the House Absolute. Do you remember?"

  "You have been death to me," she said. "I have succumbed to the trap I warned you of, if you like. Perhaps you are not death, but you will remain what you are, a torturer and a carnifex, and your hands will run with blood. Since you remember that time at the House Absolute so well, perhaps you. . . I cant say it. The Conciliator, or the Claw, or the Increate, has done this to me. Not you. "

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Dr. Talos gave us both money afterward, in the clearing. The money he had got from some court official for our play. When we were traveling, I gave everything to you. May I have it back? Ill need it. If not all of it, at least some of it. " I emptied the money in my sabretache onto the table. It was as much as I had received from her, or a trifle more.

  "Thank you," she said. "You wont need it?"

  "Not as badly as you will. Besides, it is yours. "

  "Im going to leave tomorrow, if I feel strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not. I dont suppose you know how often the boats put out, going downriver?"

  "As often as you want them to. You push them in, and the river does the rest. "

  "Thats not like you, Severian, or at least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have said, from what youve told me. Which reminds me that youre not the first visitor Ive had today. Our friend - your friend, at least - Hethor was here. Thats not funny to you, is it? Im sorry, I just wanted to change the subject. "

  "He enjoys it. Enjoys watching me. "

  "Thousands of people do when you perform in public, and you enjoy doing it yourself. "

  "They come to be horrified, so they can congratulate themselves later on being alive. And because they like the excitement, and the suspense of not knowing whether the condemned will break down, or if some macabre accident will occur. I enjoy exercising my skill, the only real skill I have - enjoy making things go perfectly. Hethor wants something else. "

  "The pain?"

  "Yes, the pain, but something more too. " Dorcas said, "He worships you, you know. He talked with me for some time, and I think he would walk into a fire if you told him to. " I must have winced at that, because she continued, "All this about Hethor is making you ill, isnt it? One sick person is enough. Lets speak of something else. "

  "Not ill as you are, no. But I cant think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with his mouth open and his eyes. . . " She stirred uncomfortably. "Yes, those eyes - I saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldnt be the one to say that. A corpses eyes. You have the feeling that if you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move under your finger. "

  "That isnt it at all. When I was on the scaffold in Saltus and looked down and saw him, his eyes danced. You said, though, that the dull eyes he has at most times reminded you of a corpses. Havent you ever looked into the glass? Your own eyes are not the eyes of a dead woman. "

  "Perhaps not. " Dorcas paused. "You used to say they were beautiful. "

  "Arent you glad to live? Even if your husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once lived in is a ruin - if all those things are true - arent you full of joy because you are here again?

  Youre not a ghost, not a revenant like those we saw in the ruined town. Look in the glass as I told you. Or if you wont, look into my face or any mans and see what you are. "

  Dorcas sat up even more slowly and painfully than she had risen to drink the wine, but this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and I saw that she was naked under the thin blanket. Before her illness Jolentas skin had been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery. Dorcass was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfection than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh. Conscious of how culpable it would be to force myself on her or even to persuade her to open to me now, when she was ill and I was on the point of leaving her, I still felt desire for her stir in me. However much I love a woman - or however little - I find I want her most when I can no longer have her. But what I felt for Dorcas was stronger than that, and more complex. She had been, though only for so brief a time, the closest friend I had known, and our possession of each other, from the frantic desire in our converted storeroom in Nessus to the long and lazy playing in the bedchamber of the Vincula, was the characteristic act of our friendship as well as our love. "Youre crying," I said. "Do you want me to leave?" She shook her head, and then, as though she could no longer contain the words that seemed to force themselves out, she whispered, "Oh, wont you go too, Severian? I didnt mean it. Wont you come? Wont you come with me?"

  "I cant. "

  She sank back into the narrow bed, smaller now and more childlike.

  "I know. You have your duty to your guild. You cant betray it again and face yourself, and I wont ask you. Its only that I never quite gave up hoping you might. " I shook my head as I had before. "I have to flee the city - "

  "Severian!"

  "And to the north. Youll be going south, and if I were with you, we would have courier boats full of soldiers after us. "

  "Severian, what happened?" Dorcass face was very calm, but her eyes were wide.

  "I freed a woman. I was supposed to strangle her and throw her body into the Acis, and I could have done it - I didnt feel anything for her, not really, and it should have been easy. But when I was alone with her, I thought of Thecla. We were in a little summerhouse screened with shrubbery, that stood at the edge of the water. I had my hands around her neck, and I thought of Thecla and how I had wanted to free her. I couldnt find a way to do it. Have I ever told you?" Almost imperceptibly, Dorcas shook her head.

  "There were brothers everywhere, five to pass by the shortest route, and all of them knew me and knew of her. " (Thecla was shrieking now in some corner of my mind. ) "All I really would have had to do would have been to tell them Master Gurloes had ordered me to bring her to him. But I would have had to go with her then, and I was still trying to devise some way by which I could stay in the guild. I did not love her enough. "

  "Its past now," Dorcas said. "And, Severian, death is not the terrible thing you think it. " We had reversed our roles, like lost children who comfort each other alternately.

  I shrugged. The ghost I had eaten at Vodaluss banquet was nearly calm again; I could feel her long, cool fingers on my brain, and though I could not turn inside my own skull to see her, I knew her deep and violet eyes were behind my own. It required an effort not to speak with her voice. "At any rate, I was there with the woman, in the summerhouse, and we were alone. Her name was Cyriaca. I knew or at least suspected that she knew where the Pelerines were -

  she had been one of them for a time. There are silent means of excruciation that require no equipment, and although they are not spectacular, they are quite effective. One reaches into the body, as it were, and manipulates the clients nerves directly. I was going to use
what we call Humbabas Stick, but before I had touched her she told me. The Pelerines are near the pass of Orithyia caring for the wounded. This woman had a letter, she said, only a week ago, from someone she had known in the order. . . "

  CHAPTER TWELVE - FOLLOWING THE FLOOD

  THE SUMMERHOUSE HAD boasted a solid roof, but the sides were mere latticework, closed more by the tall forest ferns planted against them than by their slender laths. Moonbeams leaked through. More came in at the doorway, reflected from the rushing water outside. I could see the fear in Cyriacas face, and the knowledge that her only hope was that I retained some love for her; and I knew that she was thus without hope, for I felt nothing.

  "At the Autarchs camp," she repeated. "That was what Einhildis wrote. In Orithyia, near the springs of Gyoll. But you must be careful if you go there to return the book - she said too that cacogens had landed somewhere in the north. " I stared at her, trying to determine whether she were lying.

  "Thats what Einhildis told me. I suppose they must have wished to avoid the mirrors at theJHouse Absolute so they, could escape the eyes of the Autarch. Hes supposed to be their servitor, but sometimes he acts as if they were his. "

  I shook her. "Are you joking with me? The Autarch serves them?"

  "Please! Oh, please. . . "

  I dropped her.

  "Everyone. . . Erebus! Pardon me. " She sobbed, and though she lay in shadow I sensed that she was wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her scarlet habit. "Everyone knows it except the peons, and the goodmen and the good women. All the armigers and even most of the optimates, and of course the exultants have always known. Ive never seen the Autarch, but Im told that he, the Viceroy of the New Sun, is scarcely taller than I am. Do you think our proud exultants would permit someone like that to rule if there werent a thousand cannon behind him?"

  "Ive seen him," I said, "and I wondered about that. " I sought among Theclas memories for confirmation of what Cyriaca said, but I found only rumor.

  "Would you tell me about him? Please, Severian, before - "

  "No, not now. But why should the cacogens be a danger to me?"

  "Because the Autarch will surely send scouts to locate them, and I suppose the archon here will too. Anyone found near them will be assumed to have been spying for them, or whats worse, seeking them out in the hope of enlisting them in some plot against the Phoenix Throne. "

  "I understand. "

  "Severian, dont kill me. I beg you. Im not a good woman - Ive never been a good woman, never since I left the Pelerines, and I cant face dying now. "

  I asked her, "What have you done, anyway? Why does Abdiesus want you killed? Do you know?" It is simplicity itself to strangle an individual whose neck muscles are not strong, and I was already flexing my hands for the task; yet at the same time I wished it had been permissible for me to use Terminus Est instead.

  "Only loved too many men, men other than my husband. " As if moved by the memory of those embraces, she rose and came toward me. Again the moonlight fell upon her face; her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

  "He was cruel to me, so cruel, after our marriage. . . and so I took a lover, to spite him, and afterwards, another. . . " (Her voice dropped until I could hardly hear the words. )

  "And at last taking a new lover becomes a habit, a way of pushing back the days and showing yourself that all your life has not run between your fingers already, showing yourself that you are still young enough for men to bring gifts, young enough that men still want to stroke your hair. That was what I had left the Pelerines for, after all. " She paused and seemed to gather her strength. "Do you know how old I am? Did I tell you?"

  "No," I said.

  "I wont, then. But I might almost be your mother. If I had conceived within a year or two of the time it became possible for me. We were far in the south, where the great ice, all blue and white, sails on black seas. There was a little hill where I used to stand and watch, and I dreamed of putting on warm clothes and paddling out to the ice with food and a trained bird I never really had but only wanted to have, and so riding my own ice island north to an isle of palms, where I would discover the ruins of a castle built in the morning of the world. You would have been born then, perhaps, while I was alone on the ice. Why shouldnt an imaginary child be born on an imaginary trip? You would have grown up fishing and swimming in water wanner than milk. "

  "No woman is killed for being unfaithful, except by her husband," I said.

  Cyriaca sighed, and her dream fell from her. "Among the landed armigers hereabout, he is one of the few who support the archon. The others hope that by disobeying him as much as they dare and fomenting trouble among the eclectics they can persuade the Autarch to replace him. I have made my husband a laughing stock -

  and by extension his friends and the archon. " Because Thecla was within me, I saw the country villa - half manor and half fort, full of rooms that had scarcely changed in two hundred years. I heard the tittering ladies and the stamping hunters, and the sound of the horn outside the windows, and the deep barking of the boarhounds. It was the world to which Thecla had hoped to retreat; and I felt pity for this woman, who had been forced into that retreat when she had never known any wider sphere. Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Taloss play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present. At that counter I tendered Cyriacas life in payment for Theclas. When I led her from the summerhouse, she supposed, I know, that I intended to kill her at the edge of the water. Instead, I pointed to the river.