by Gene Wolfe
Page 36
Fireflies glimmered in the trees to either side of the path, and for a long time 1 supposed that the lights ahead of us were only more such insects and did not hurry my pace. Then, very suddenly as it seemed to me, we were beneath some shadowy roof where men and women with yellow lamps moved up and down between long rows of shrouded cots. A woman in clothes I supposed were black took charge of us and led us to another place where there were chairs of leather and horn, and a fire burned in a brazier. There I saw that her gown was scarlet, and she wore a scarlet hood, and for a moment I thought that she was Cyriaca.
"Your friend is very ill, isnt he?" she said. "Do you know what is the matter with him?"
And the soldier shook his head and answered, "No. Im not even sure who he is. "
I was too stunned to speak. She took my hand, then released it and took the soldiers. "He has a fever. So do you. Now that the heat of summer is come, we see more disease each day. You should have boiled your water and kept yourselves as clean of lice as you could. " She turned to me. "You have a great many shallow cuts too, and some them are infected. Rock shards?"
I managed to say, "Im not the one who is ill. I brought my friend here. "
"You are both ill, and I suspect you brought each other. I doubt that either of you would have reached us without the other. Was it rock shards? Some weapon of the enemys?"
"Rock shards, yes. A weapon of a friends. "
"That is the worst thing, I am told - to be fired upon by your own side. But the fever is the chief concern. " She hesitated, looking from the soldier to me and back. "Id like to put you both in bed now, but youll have to go to the bath first. "
She clapped her hands to summon a burly man with a shaven head. He took our arms and began to lead us away, then stopped and picked me up, carrying me as I had once carried little Severian. In a few moments we were naked and sitting in a pool of water heated by stones. The burly man splashed more water over us, then made us get out one at a time so he could crop our hair with a pair of shears. After that we were left to soak awhile.
"You can speak now," I said to the soldier. I saw him nod in the lamplight.
"Why didnt you, then, when we were coming here?" He hesitated, and his shoulders moved a trifle. "I was thinking of many things, and you didnt talk yourself. You seemed so tired. Once I asked if we shouldnt stop, but you didnt answer. " I said, "It seemed to me otherwise, but perhaps we are both correct. Do you recall what happened to you before you met me?" Again there was a pause. "I dont even remember meeting you. We were walking down a dark path, and you were beside me. "
"And before that?"
"I dont know. Music, perhaps, and walking a long way. In sunshine at first but later through the dark. "
"That walking was while you were with me," I said. "Dont you recall anything else?"
"Flying through the dark. Yes, I was with you, and we came to a place where the sun hung just above our heads. There was a light before us, but when I stepped into it, it became a kind of darkness. " I nodded. "You werent wholly rational, you see. On a warm day it can seem that the suns just overhead, and when it is down behind the mountains it seems the light becomes darkness. Do you recall your name?"
At that he thought for several moments, and at last smiled ruefully.
"I lost it somewhere along the way. Thats what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat. "
The burly man with the shaven head had come back without either of us noticing. He helped me out of the pool and gave me a towel with which to dry myself, a robe to wear, and a canvas sack containing my possessions, which now smelled strongly of the smoke of fumigation. A day earlier it would have tormented me nearly to frenzy to have the Claw out of my possession for an instant. That night I had hardly realized it was gone until it was returned to me, and I did not verify that it had indeed been returned until I lay on one of the cots under a veil of netting. The Claw shone in my hand then, softly as the moon; and it was shaped as the moon sometimes is. I smiled to think that its flooding light of pale green is the reflection of the sun.
On the first night I slept in Saltus, I had awakened thinking I was in the apprentices dormitory in our tower. Now I had the same experience in reverse: I slept and found in sleep that the shadowy lazaret with its silent figures and moving lamps had been no more than a hallucination of the day.
I sat up and looked around. I felt well - better, in fact, than I had ever felt before; but I was warm. I seemed to glow from within. Roche was sleeping on his side, his red hair tousled and his mouth slightly open, his face relaxed and boyish without the energy of his mind behind it. Through the port I could see snow drifts in the Old Court, new-fallen snow that showed no tracks of men or their animals; but it occurred to me that in the necropolis there would be hundreds of footprints already as the small creatures who found shelter there, the pets and the playmates of the dead, came out to search for food and to disport themselves in the new landscape Nature had bestowed on them. I dressed quickly and silently, holding my finger to my own lips when one of the other apprentices stirred, and hurried down the steep stair that wound through the center of the tower.
It seemed longer than usual, and I found I had difficulty in going from step to step. We are always aware of the hindrance of gravity when we climb stairs, but we take for granted the assistance it gives us when we descend. Now that assistance had been withdrawn, or nearly so. I had to force each foot down, but do it in a way that prevented it from sending me shooting up when it struck the step, as it would have if I had stamped. In that uncanny way we know things in dreams, I understood that all the towers of the Citadel had risen at last and were on their voyage beyond the circle of Dis. I felt happy in the knowledge, but I still desired to go into the necropolis and track the coatis and foxes. I was hurrying down as fast as I could when I heard a groan. The stairway no longer descended as it should but led into a cabin, just as the stairs in Baldanderss castle had stretched down the walls of its chambers.
This was Master Malrubiuss sickroom. Masters are entitled to spacious quarters; still, this was larger by far than the actual cabin had been. There were two ports just as I remembered, but they were enormous - the eyes of Mount Typhon. Master Malrubiuss bed was very large, yet it seemed lost in the immensity of the room. Two figures bent over him. Though their clothing was dark, it struck me that it was not the fuligin of the guild. I went to them, and when I was so near I could hear the sick mans labored breathing, they straightened up and turned to look at me. They were the Cumaean and her acolyte Merryn, the witches we had met atop the tomb in the ruined stone town.
"Ah, sister, you have come at last," Merryn said. As she spoke, I realized that I was not, as I had thought, the apprentice Severian. I was Thecla as she had been when she was his height, which is to say at about the age of thirteen or fourteen. I felt an intense embarrassment - not because of my girls body or because I was wearing masculine clothes (which indeed I rather enjoyed) but because I had been unaware of it previously. I also felt that Merryns words had been an act of magic - that both Severian and I had been present before, and that she had by some means driven him into the background. The Cumaean kissed me on the forehead, and when the kiss was over wiped blood from her lips. Although she did not speak, I knew this was a signal that I had in some sense become the soldier too.
"When we sleep," Merryn told me, "we move from temporality to eternity. "
"When we wake," the Cumaean whispered, "we lose the facility to see beyond the present moment. "
"She never wakes," Merryn boasted. Master Malrubius stirred and groaned, and the Cumaean took a carafe of water from the table by his bed and poured a little into a tumbler. When she set down the carafe again, something living stirred in it. I, for some reason, thought it the undine; I drew back, but it was Hethor, no higher than my hand, his gray, stubbled face pressed against the glass. I heard his voice as one might hear the squeaking of mice:
"Sometimes driven aground by
the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demonhaunted mirror sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that goes racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind. . . " There was a bell on the table beside the carafe. Merryn rang it as though to overpower Hethors voice, and when Master Malrubius had moistened his lips with the tumbler, she took it from the Cumaean, flung what remained of its water on the floor, and inverted it over the neck of the carafe. Hethor was silenced, but the water spread over the floor, bubbling as though fed by a hidden spring. It was icy cold. I thought vaguely that my governess would be angry because my shoes were wet.
A maid was coming in answer to the ring - Theclas maid, whose flayed leg I had inspected the day after I had saved Vodalus. She was younger, as young as she must have been when Thecla was actually a girl, but her leg had been flayed already and ran with blood. "I am so sorry," I said. "I am so sorry, Hunna. I didnt do it -
it was Master Gurloes, and some journeymen. " Master Malrubius sat up in bed, and for the first time I observed that his bed was in actuality a womans hand, with fingers longer than my arm and nails like talons. "Youre well!" he said, as though I were the one who had been dying. "Or nearly well, at least. " The fingers of the hand began to close upon him, but he leaped from the bed and into water that was now knee high to stand beside me. A dog - my old dog Triskele - had apparently been hiding beneath the bed, or perhaps only lying on the farther side of it, out of sight. Now he came to us, splashing the water with his single forepaw as he drove his broad chest through it and barking joyously. Master Malrubius took my right hand and the Cumaean my left; together they led me to one of the great eyes of the mountain. I saw the view I had seen when Typhon had led me there: The world rolled out like a carpet and visible in its entirety. This time it was more magnificent by far. The sun was behind us; its beams seemed to have multiplied their strength. Shadows were alchemized to gold, and every green thing grew darker and stronger as I looked. I could see the grain ripening in the fields and even the myriad fish of the sea doubling and redoubling with the increase of the tiny surface plants that sustained them. Water from the room behind us poured from the eye and, catching the light, fell in a rainbow. Then I woke.
While I slept, someone had wrapped me in sheets packed with snow. (I learned later that it was brought down from the mountaintops by sure-footed sumpters. ) Shivering, I longed to return to my dream, though I was already half-aware of the immense distance that separated us. The bitter taste of medicine was in my mouth, the stretched canvas felt as hard as a floor beneath me, and scarlet-clad Pelerines with lamps moved to and fro, tending men and women who groaned in the dark.
CHAPTER FIVE - THE LAZARET
I do not believe I really slept again that night, though I may have dozed. When dawn came, the snow had melted. Two Pelerines took the sheets away, gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and brought dry bedding. I wanted to give the Claw to them then - my possessions were in the bag under my cot - but the moment seemed inappropriate. I lay down instead, and now that it was daylight, slept. I woke again about noon. The lazaret was as quiet as it ever became; somewhere far off two men were talking and another cried out, but their voices only emphasized the stillness. I sat up and looked around, hoping to see the soldier. On my right lay a man whose close-cropped scalp made me think at first that he was one of the slaves of the Pelerines. I called to him, but when he turned his head to look at me, I saw I had been mistaken.
His eyes were emptier than any human eyes I had ever seen, and they seemed to watch spirits invisible to me. "Glory to the Group of Seventeen," he said.
"Good morning. Do you know anything about the way this place is run?"
A shadow appeared to cross his face, and I sensed that my question had somehow made him suspicious. He answered, "All endeavors are conducted well or ill precisely in so far as they conform to Correct Thought. "
"Another man was brought in at the same time I was. Id like to talk to him. Hes a friend of mine, more or less. "
"Those who do the will of the populace are friends, though we have never spoken to them. Those who do not do the will of the populace are enemies, though we learned together as children. " The man on my left called, "You wont get anything out of him. Hes a prisoner. "
I turned to look at him. His face, though wasted nearly to a skull, retained something of humor. His stiff, black hair looked as though it had not seen a comb for months.
"He talks like that all the time. Never any other way. Hey, you!
Were going to beat you!"
The other answered, "For the Armies of the Populace, defeat is the springboard of victory, and victory the ladder to further victory. "
"He makes a lot more sense than most of them, though," the man on my left told me.
"You say hes a prisoner. What did he do?"
"Do? Why, he didnt die. "
