The Claw Of The Conciliator (23 page)

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.

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 deathlike 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 found 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?”

“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.”