The Claw Of The Conciliator (8 page)

“I should have known. I had told her about Thecla. You don’t know about Thecla, but she did, and that was what the letter was about. I told her while we were going through the Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There were mistakes in the letter and things Thecla would never have said, but I didn’t stop to think of them when I read it.”

I stepped away and replaced the Claw in my boot, thrusting it deep. “Maybe you had better attend to your animal, as you say. My own seems to have broken loose, and we may have to take turns riding yours.”

Jonas nodded and began to climb back the way he had come. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” I asked Agia. “I heard something, and the destrier cocked his ears at the sound. That was you. Why didn’t you kill me then?”

“We were up there.” She gestured toward the heights. “And I wanted the men I’d hired to shoot you when you came wading up the brook. They were stupid and stubborn as men always are, and said they wouldn’t waste their quarrels—that the creatures inside would kill you. I rolled down a stone, the biggest I could move, but by then it was too late.”

“They had told you about the mine?”

Agia shrugged, and the moonlight turned her bare shoulders to something more precious and more beautiful than flesh. “You’re going to kill me now, so what does it matter? All the local people tell stories about this place. They say those things come out at night during storms and take animals from the cowsheds, and sometimes break into the houses for children. There’s also a legend that they guard treasure inside, so I put that in the letter too. I thought if you wouldn’t come for your Thecla, you might for that. Can I stand with my back to you, Severian? If it’s all the same, I don’t want to see it coming.”

When she said that, I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my heart: I had not been certain I could strike her if I had to look into her face. I raised my own iron phallus, and as I did so felt there was one more thing I wanted to ask Agia; but I could not recall what it might be.

“Strike,” she said. “I am ready.”

I sought good footing, and my fingers found the woman’s head at one end of the guard, the head that marked the female edge. And a little later, again, “Strike!” But by that time I had climbed out of the vale.

We returned to the inn in silence, and so slowly that the eastern sky was gray before we reached the town. Jonas was unsaddling the merychip when I said, “I didn’t kill her.”

He nodded without looking at me. “I know.”

“Did you watch? You said you wouldn’t.”

“I heard her voice when you were practically standing beside me. Will she try again?”

I waited, thinking, while he carried the little saddle into the tack room. When he came out, I said, “Yes, I’m sure she will. I didn’t exact a promise from her, if that’s what you mean. She wouldn’t have kept one in any case.”

“I would have killed her then.”

“Yes,” I said. “That would have been the right thing to do.”

We walked out of the stable together. There was light enough in the inn yard now for us to see the well, and the wide doors that led into the inn.

“I don’t think it would have been right—I’m only saying that I would have done it. I would have imagined myself stabbed in my sleep, dying on a dirty bed somewhere, and I would have swung that thing. It wouldn’t have been right.”

Jonas lifted the mace the man-ape had left behind, and chopped with it in a parody, brutal and graceless, of a sword cut. The head caught the light and both of us gasped.

It was of pounded gold.

Neither of us felt any desire to join the festivities the fair still proffered to those who had caroused all night. We retired to the room we shared, and prepared for sleep. When Jonas offered to share his gold with me, I refused. Earlier, I had had money in plenty and the advance on my fee, and he had been living, as it were, upon my largess. Now I was happy that he would no longer feel himself in my debt. I was ashamed, too, when I saw how completely he trusted me with his gold, and remembered how carefully I had concealed (in fact, still concealed) the existence of the Claw from him. I felt bound to tell him of it; but I did not, and contrived instead to slip my foot from my wet boot in such a way that the Claw fell into the toe.

I woke about noon, and after satisfying myself that the Claw was still there, roused Jonas as he had asked me. “There should be jewelers at the fair who’ll give me some sort of price for this,” he said. “At least, I can bargain with them. Want to come with me?”

“We should have something to eat, and by the time we’re through, I’ll be due at the scaffold.”

“Back to work then.”

“Yes.” I had picked up my cloak. It was sadly torn, and my boots were dull and still slightly damp.

“One of the maids here can sew that for you. It won’t be as good as new, but it will be a lot better than it is now.” Jonas swung open the door. “Come along, if you’re hungry. What are you looking so thoughtful about?”

In the inn’s parlor, with a good meal between us, and the innkeeper’s wife exercising her needle on my cloak in another room, I told him what had happened under the hill, ending with the steps I had heard far below ground.

“You’re a strange man,” was all he said.

“You are stranger than I. You don’t want people to know it, but you’re a foreigner of some kind.”

He smiled. “A cacogen?”

“An outlander.”

Jonas shook his head, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose I am. But you—you have this talisman that lets you command nightmares, and you have discovered a hoard of silver. Yet you talk about it to me as someone else might talk about the weather.”

I took a bit of bread. “It is strange, I agree. But the strangeness resides in the Claw, the thing itself, and not in me. As for talking about it to you, why shouldn’t I? If I were to steal your gold, I could sell it and spend the money, but I don’t think things would go well for someone who stole the Claw. I don’t know why I think that, but I do, and of course Agia stole it. As for the silver—”

“And she put it in your pocket?”

“In the sabretache that hangs from my belt. She thought her brother would kill me, remember. Then they were going to claim my body—they had planned that already, so they’d get Terminus Est and my habit. She would have had my sword and clothes and the gem too, and meanwhile, if it were found, I would be blamed and not she. I remember …”

“What?”

“The Pelerines. They stopped us as we were trying to get out. Jonas, do you think it’s true that some people can read the thoughts of others?”

“Of course.”

“Not everyone is so sure. Master Gurloes used to speak favorably of the idea, but Master Palaemon wouldn’t hear of it. Still, I think the chief priestess of the Pelerines could, at least to some degree. She knew Agia had taken something, and that I had not. She made Agia strip so they could search her, but they didn’t search me. Later they destroyed their cathedral, and I think that must have been because of the loss of the Claw—it was the Cathedral of the Claw, after all.”

Jonas nodded thoughtfully.

“But none of this is what I wanted to ask you about. I’d like your opinion of the footsteps. Everyone knows about Erebus and Abaia and the other beings in the sea who will come to land someday. Nevertheless, I think you know more about them than most of the rest of us.”

Jonas’s face, which had been so open before, was closed and guarded now. “And why do you think that?”

“Because you’ve been a sailor, and because of the story about the beans—the story you told at the gate. You must have seen my brown book when I was reading it upstairs. It tells all the secrets of the world, or at least what various mages have said they were. I haven’t read it all or even half of it, though Thecla and I used to read an entry every few days and spend the time between readings arguing about it. But I’ve noticed that all the explanations in that book are simple, and seemingly childish.”

“Like my story.”

I nodded. “Your story might have come out of the book. When I first carried it to Thecla, I supposed it was intended for children, or for adults who enjoyed childish things. But when we had talked about some of the thoughts in it, I understood that they had to be expressed in that way or they couldn’t be expressed at all. If the writer had wanted to describe a new way to make wine or the best way to make love, he could have used complex and accurate language. But in the book he really wrote he had to say, ‘In the beginning was only the hexaemeron,’ or ‘It is not to see the icon standing still, but to see the still standing.’ The thing I heard underground … was that one of them?”

“I didn’t see it.” Jonas rose. “I’m going out now to sell the mace, but before I go I’m going to tell you what all housewives sooner or later tell their husbands: ‘Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.’”

“One last question,” I said, “and then I promise I won’t ask you anything more. When we were going through the Wall, you said the things we saw in there were soldiers, and you implied they had been stationed there to resist Abaia and the others. Are the man-apes soldiers of the same kind? And if they are, what good can human-sized fighters do when our opponents are as large as mountains? And why didn’t the old autarchs use human soldiers?”

Jonas had wrapped the mace in a rag and stood now shifting it from one hand to the other. “That’s three questions, and the only one I can answer for certain is the second. I’ll guess at the other two, but I’m going to hold you to your promise; this is the last time we’re going to speak of these things.”

“The last question first. The old autarchs, who were not autarchs or called so, did use human soldiers. But the warriors they had created by humanizing animals, and perhaps, in secret by bestializing men, were more loyal. They had to be, since the populace—who hated their rulers—hated these inhuman servitors more still. Thus the servitors could be made to endure things that human soldiers would not. That may have been why they were used in the Wall. Or there may be some other explanation entirely.”

Jonas paused and walked to the window, looking not into the street but up at the clouds. “I don’t know whether your man-apes are the same kind of hybrid. The one I saw looked quite human to me except for his pelt, so I would be inclined to agree with you that they are human beings who have undergone some change in their essential nature as a result of their life in the mines and their contact with the relics of the city buried there. Urth is very old now. It’s very old, and no doubt there have been many treasures hidden in bygone times. Gold and silver do not alter, but their guardians can suffer metamorphoses stranger than those that turn grapes to wine and sand to pearls.”

I said, “But we outside endure the dark each night, and the treasures carried up from the mines are brought to us. Why haven’t we changed too?”

Jonas did not answer, and I remembered my promise to ask him nothing more. Still, when he turned to face me there was something in his eyes that told me I was being a fool, that we had changed. He turned away again and stared out and up once more.

“All right,” I conceded, “you don’t have to answer that. But what about the other question you pledged yourself to answer? How can human soldiers resist the monsters from the seas?”

“You were correct when you said Erebus and Abaia are as great as mountains, and I admit that I was surprised you knew it. Most people lack the imagination to conceive of anything so large, and think them no bigger than houses or ships. Their actual size is so great that while they remain on this world they can never leave the water—their own weight would crush them. You mustn’t think of them battering at the Wall with their fists, or tossing boulders about. But by their thoughts they enlist servants, and they fling them against all rules that rival their own.”

Jonas opened the inn’s door then and slipped out into the bustle of the street; I remained where I was, resting an elbow on what had been our breakfast table, and recalled the dream I had experienced when I had shared Baldanders’s bed. The land could not hold us, the monstrous women had said.

Now I am come to a part of my story where I cannot help but write of something I have largely avoided mentioning before. You that read it cannot but have noticed that I have not scrupled to recount in great detail things that transpired years ago, and to give the very words of those who spoke to me, and the very words with which I replied; and you must have thought this only a conventional device I had adopted to make my story flow more smoothly. The truth is that I am one of those who are cursed with what is called perfect recollection. We cannot, as I have sometimes heard foolishly alleged, remember everything. I cannot recall the ordering of the books on the shelves in the library of Master Ultan, for example. But I can remember more than many would credit: the position of each object on a table I walked past when I was a child, and even that I have recalled some scene to mind previously, and how that remembered incident differed from the memory of it I have now.

It was my power of recollection that made me the favorite pupil of Master Palaemon, and so I suppose it can be blamed for the existence of this narrative, for if he had not favored me, I would not have been sent to Thrax bearing his sword.

Some say this power is linked to weak judgment—of that I am no judge. But it has another danger, one I have encountered many times. When I cast my mind into the past, as I am doing now and as I did then when I sought to recall my dream, I remember it so well that I seem to move again in the bygone day, a day old—new, and unchanged each time I draw it to the surface of my mind, its eidolons as real as I. I can even now close my eyes and walk into Thecla’s cell as I did one winter evening; and soon my fingers will feel the heat of her garment while the perfume of her person fills my nostrils like the perfume of lilies warmed before a fire. I lift her gown from her and embrace that ivory body, feeling her nipples pressed to my face …

You see? It is very easy to waste hours and days in such rememberings, and sometimes I fall so deeply into them that I am drugged and drunken. So it was now. The footfalls I had heard in the man-apes’ cavern still echoed in my mind, and seeking some explanation I returned to my dream, certain now that I knew from whom it had come, and hoping it had revealed more than its shaper apprehended.