Lead
There was a moment when I thought I would fall into the gaping hole in the center of the little room before I could regain
Terminus Est
and carry the mistress of the Duck's Nest to safety, and another when I was certain everything was going to fallâthe trembling structure of the room itself and us together.
Yet in the end we escaped. When we reached the street, it was clear of dimarchi and townsfolk alike, the soldiers no doubt having been drawn to the fire below, and the people frightened indoors. I propped the woman with my arm, and though she was still too terrified to answer my questions intelligibly, I let her choose our way; as I had supposed she would, she led us unerringly to her inn.
Dorcas was asleep. I did not wake her, but sat down in the dark on a stool near the bed where there was now also a little table sufficient to hold the glass and bottle I had taken from the common room below. Whatever the wine was, it seemed strong in my mouth and yet no more than water after I had swallowed it; by the time Dorcas woke, I had drunk half the bottle and felt no more effect from it than I would have if I had swallowed so much sherbet.
She started up, then let her head fall upon the pillow again. “Severian. I should have known it was you.”
“I'm sorry if I frightened you,” I said. “I came to see how you were.”
“That's very kind. It always seems, though, that when I wake up you're bending over me.” For a moment she closed her eyes again. “You walk so very quietly in those thick-soled boots of yours, do you know that? It's one reason people are afraid of you.”
“You said I reminded you of a vampire once, because I had been eating a pomegranate and my lips were stained with red. We laughed about it. Do you remember?” (It had been in a field within the Wall of Nessus, when we had slept beside Dr. Talos's theater and awakened to feast on fruit dropped the night before by our fleeing audience.)
“Yes,” Dorcas said. “You want me to laugh again, don't you? But I'm afraid I can't ever laugh anymore.”
“Would you like some wine? It was free, and it's not as bad as I expected.”
“To cheer me? No. One ought to drink, I think, when one is cheerful already. Otherwise nothing but more sorrow is poured into the cup.”
“At least have a swallow. The hostess here says you've been ill and haven't eaten all day.”
I saw Dorcas's golden head move on the pillow then as she turned it to look at me; and since she seemed fully awake, I ventured to light the candle.
She said, “You're wearing your habit. You must have frightened her out of her wits.”
“No, she wasn't afraid of me. She's pouring into her cup whatever she finds in the bottle.”
“She's been good to meâshe's very kind. Don't be hard on her if she chooses to drink so late at night.”
“I wasn't being hard on her. But won't you have something? There must be food in the kitchen here, and I'll bring you up whatever you want.”
My choice of phrase made Dorcas smile faintly. “I've been bringing up my own food all day. That was what she meant when she told you I'd been ill. Or did she tell you? Spewing. I should think you could smell it yet, though the poor woman did what she could to clean up after me.”
Dorcas paused and sniffed. “What is it I do smell? Scorched cloth? It must be the candle, but I don't suppose you can trim the wick with that great blade of yours.”
I said, “It's my cloak, I think. I've been standing too near a fire.”
“I'd ask you to open the window, but I see it's open already. I'm afraid it's bothering you. It does blow the candle about. Do the flickering shadows make you dizzy?”
“No,” I said. “It's all right as long as I don't actually look at the flame.”
“From your expression, you feel the way I always do around water.”
“This afternoon I found you sitting at the very edge of the river.”
“I know,” Dorcas said, and fell silent. It was a silence that lasted so long that I was afraid she was not going to speak again at all, that the pathological silence (as I now was sure it had been) that had seized her then had returned.
At last I said, “I was surprised to see you thereâI remember that I looked several times before I was sure it was you, although I had been searching for you.”
“I spewed, Severian. I told you that, didn't I?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Do you know what I brought up?”
She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas's mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak. But this seemed more than that; I felt
that Dorcas would go on talking if I left the room. “No,” I answered. “Water, perhaps?”
“Sling-stones.”
I thought she was speaking metaphorically, and only ventured, “That must have been very unpleasant.”
Her head rolled on the pillow again, and now I could see her blue eyes with their wide pupils. In their emptiness they might have been two little ghosts. “Sling-stones, Severian my darling. Heavy little slugs of metal, each about as big around as a nut and not quite so long as my thumb and stamped with the word
strike
. They came rattling out of my throat into the bucket, and I reached downâput my hand down into the filth that came up with them and pulled them up to see. The woman who owns this inn came and took the bucket away, but I had wiped them off and saved them. There are two, and they're in the drawer of that table now. She brought it to put my dinner on. Do you want to see them? Open it.”
I could not imagine what she was talking about, and asked if she thought someone was trying to poison her.
“No, not at all. Aren't you going to open the drawer? You're so brave. Don't you want to look?”
“I trust you. If you say there are sling-stones in the table, I'm sure they're there.”
“But you don't believe I coughed them up. I don't blame you. Isn't there a story about a hunter's daughter who was blessed by a pardal, so that beads of jet fell from her mouth when she spoke? And then her brother's wife stole the blessing, and when she spoke toads hopped from her lips? I remember hearing it, but I never believed it.”
“How could anyone cough up lead?”
Dorcas laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Easily. So very easily. Do you know what I saw today? Do you know why I couldn't talk to you when you found me? And I couldn't, Severian, I swear it. I know you thought I was just angry and being stubborn. But I wasn'tâI had become like a stone, wordless, because nothing seemed to matter, and I'm still not sure anything does. I'm sorry, though, for what I said about your not being brave. You are brave, I know that. It's only that it seems not brave when you're doing things to the poor prisoners here. You were so brave when you fought Agilus, and later when you would have fought with Baldanders because we thought he was going to kill Jolenta ⦔
She fell silent again, then sighed. “Oh, Severian, I'm so tired.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” I said. “About the prisoners. I want you to understand, even if you can't forgive me. It was my profession, the thing I was trained to do from boyhood.” I leaned forward and took her hand; it seemed as frail as a songbird.
“You've said something like this before. Truly, I understand.”
“And I could do it well. Dorcas, that's what you
don't
understand. Excruciation and execution are arts, and I have the feel, the gift, the blessing. This swordâall the tools we use live when they're in my hands. If I had
remained at the Citadel, I might have been a master. Dorcas, are you listening? Does this mean anything at all to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “A bit, yes. I'm thirsty, though. If you're through drinking, pour me a little of that wine now, please.”
I did as she asked, filling the glass no more than a quarter full because I was afraid she might spill it on her bedclothes.
She sat up to drink, something I had not been certain until then that she was capable of, and when she had swallowed the last scarlet drop hurled the glass out the window. I heard it shatter on the street below.
“I don't want you to drink after me,” she told me. “And I knew that if I didn't do that you would.”
“You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?”
She laughed again. “Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death. Severian, you never asked me what it was I saw today.”
The Hand of the Past
As soon as Dorcas said, “You never asked me what I saw today,” I realized that I had been trying to steer the conversation away from it. I had a premonition that it would be something quite meaningless to me, to which Dorcas would attach great meaning, as madmen do who believe the tracks of worms beneath the bark of fallen trees to be a supernatural script. I said, “I thought it might be better to keep your mind off it, whatever it was.”
“No doubt it would, if only we could do it. It was a chair.”
“A chair?”
“An old chair. And a table, and several other things. It seems that there is a shop in the Turners' Street that sells old furniture to the eclectics, and to those among the autochthons who have absorbed enough of our culture to want it. There is no source here to supply the demand, and so two or three times a year the owner and his sons go to Nessusâto the abandoned quarters of the southâand fill their boat. I talked to him, you see; I know all about it. There are tens of thousands of empty houses there. Some have fallen in long ago, but some are still standing as their owners left them. Most have been looted, yet they still find silver and bits of jewelry now and then. And though most have lost most of their furniture, the owners who moved almost always left some things behind.”
I felt that she was about to weep, and I leaned forward to stroke her forehead. She showed me by a glance that she did not wish me to, and laid herself on the bed again as she had been before.
“In some of those houses, all the furnishings are still there. Those are the best, he said. He thinks that a few families, or perhaps only a few people living alone, remained behind when the quarter died. They were too old to move, or too stubborn. I've thought about it, and I'm sure some of them must have had something there they could not bear to leave. A grave, perhaps. They boarded their windows against the marauders, and they kept dogs, and worse things, to protect them. Eventually they leftâor they came to the end of life, and their animals devoured their bodies and broke free; but by that time there was no one there, not even looters or scavengers, not until this man and his sons.”
“There must be a great many old chairs,” I said.
“Not like that one. I knew everything about itâthe carving on the legs and even the pattern in the grain of the arms. So much came back then. And then here, when I vomited those pieces of lead, things like hard, heavy seeds, then I knew. Do you remember, Severian, how it was when we left the Botanic Garden? You, Agia, and I came out of that great, glass vivarium, and you hired a boat to take us from the island to the shore, and the river was full of nenuphars with blue flowers and shining green leaves. Their seeds are like that, hard and heavy and dark, and I have heard that they sink to the bottom of Gyoll and remain there for whole ages of the world. But when chance brings them near the surface they sprout no matter how old they may be, so that the flowers of a chiliad past are seen to bloom again.”
“I have heard that too,” I said. “But it means nothing to you or me.”
Dorcas lay still, but her voice trembled. “What is the power that calls them back? Can you explain it?”
“The sunshine, I supposeâbut no, I cannot explain it.”
“And is there no source of sunlight except the sun?”
I knew then what it was she meant, though something in me could not accept it.
“When that manâHildegrin, the man we met a second time on top of the tomb in the ruined stone townâwas ferrying us across the Lake of Birds, he talked of millions of dead people, people whose bodies had been sunk in that water. How were they made to sink, Severian? Bodies float. How do they weight them? I don't know. Do you?”
I did. “They force lead shot down the throats.”
“I thought so.” Her voice was so weak now that I could scarcely hear her, even in that silent little room. “No, I knew so. I knew it when I saw them.”
“You think that the Claw brought you back.”
Dorcas nodded.
“It has acted, sometimes, I'll admit that. But only when I took it out, and not always then. When you pulled me out of the water in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it was in my sabretache and I didn't even know I had it.”
“Severian, you allowed me to hold it once before. Could I see it again now?”
I pulled it from its soft pouch and held it up. The blue fires seemed sleepy, but I could see the cruel-looking hook at the center of the gem that had given it its name. Dorcas extended her hand, but I shook my head, remembering the wineglass.
“You think I will do it some harm, don't you? I won't. It would be a sacrilege.”
“If you believe what you say, and I think you do, then you must hate it for drawing you back ⦔
“From death.” She was watching the ceiling again, now smiling as if she shared some deep and ludicrous secret with it. “Go ahead and say it. It won't hurt you.”
“From sleep,” I said. “Since if one can be recalled from it, it is not
deathânot death as we have always understood it, the death that is in our minds when we say
death
. Although I have to confess it is still almost impossible for me to believe that the Conciliator, dead now for so many thousands of years, should act through this stone to raise others.”
Dorcas made no reply. I could not even be sure she was listening.
“You mentioned Hildegrin,” I said, “and the time he rowed us across the lake in his boat, to pick the avern. Do you remember what he said of death? It was that she was a good friend to the birds. Perhaps we ought to have known then that such a death could not be death as we imagine it.”
“If I say I believe all that, will you let me hold the Claw?”
I shook my head again.
Dorcas was not looking at me, but she must have seen the motion of my shadow; or perhaps it was only that her mental Severian on the ceiling shook his head as well. “You are right, thenâI was going to destroy it if I could. Shall I tell you what I really believe? I believe I have been deadânot sleeping, but dead. That all my life took place a long, long time ago when I lived with my husband above a little shop, and took care of our child. That this Conciliator of yours who came so long ago was an adventurer from one of the ancient races who outlived the universal death.” Her hands clutched the blanket. “I ask you, Severian, when he comes again, isn't he to be called the New Sun? Doesn't that sound like it? And I believe that when he came he brought with him something that had the same power over time that Father Inire's mirrors are said to have over distance. It is that gem of yours.”
She stopped and turned her head to look at me defiantly; when I said nothing, she continued. “Severian, when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you half healed your friend's wounds, it was because it bent the moment to one when they would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the fen in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it must have touched me or nearly touched me, and for me it became the time in which I had lived, so that I lived again. But I have been dead. For a long, long time I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved in the brown water. And there is something in me that is dead still.”
“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.”
“I'm going to go back, Severian. I know that now, and that's what I've 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 can't go with me ⦔
I nodded.
“And I'm not asking you to. I don't 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 don't want to take death with me when I go to look for my life.”
“I understand,” I said.
“My child may still be aliveâan 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 can't 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? I'll 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 won't need it?”
“Not as badly as you will. Besides, it is yours.”
“I'm going to leave tomorrow, if I feel strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not. I don't 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.”
“That's not like you, Severian, or at least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have said, from what you've told me. Which reminds me that you're not the first visitor I've had today. Our friendâyour friend, at leastâHethor was here. That's not funny to you, is it? I'm 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 haveâenjoy 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, isn't it? One sick person is enough. Let's speak of something else.”
“Not ill as you are, no. But I can't think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with his mouth open and his eyes ⦔
She stirred uncomfortably. “Yes, those eyesâI saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldn't be the one to say that. A corpse's eyes. You have the feeling that if you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move under your finger.”
“That isn't 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 corpse's. Haven't 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.”
“Aren't you glad to live? Even if your husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once lived in is a ruinâif all those things are trueâaren't you full of joy because you are here again? You're 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 won't, look into my face or any man's 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 Jolenta's skin had been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery. Dorcas's 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 womanâor however littleâI 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.