Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer

“The third is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate Origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion by him, so all must express his will—which is the higher reality.”

“You’re saying that what we saw was a sign.”

I shook my head. “The book is saying that everything is a sign. The post of that fence is a sign, and so is the way the tree leans across it. Some signs may betray the third meaning more readily than others.” For perhaps a hundred paces we were both silent. Then Dorcas said, “It seems to me that if what the Chatelaine Thecla’s book says is true, then people have everything backward. We saw a great structure leap into the air and fall to nothing, didn’t we ?”

“I only saw it suspended over the city. Did it leap?” Dorcas nodded. I could see the glimmer of her pale hair in the moonlight. “It seems to me that what you call the third meaning is very clear. But the second meaning is harder to find, and the first, which ought to be the easiest, is impossible.”

I was about to say I understood her—at least about the first meaning—when I heard from some distance off a rumbling roar that might have been a long roll of thunder. Dorcas exclaimed, “What’s that?” and took my hand in her own small, warm one, which I found very pleasant.

“I don’t know, but I think it came from the copse up ahead.”

She nodded. “Now I hear voices.”

“Your hearing is better than mine then.”

The rumbling sounded again, louder and more prolonged; and this time, perhaps only because we were a trifle nearer, I thought I saw the gleam of lights through the trunks of the grove of young beeches ahead of us. “There!” Dorcas said, and pointed in a direction somewhat to the north of the trees. “That can’t be a star. It’s too low and too bright, and moves too quickly.”

“It’s a lantern, I think. On a wagon, perhaps, or carried in someone’s hand.” The rumble came once more, and this time I knew it for what it was, the rolling of a drum. I could hear voices now myself, very faintly, and particularly one voice that sounded deeper than the drum and almost as loud. As we rounded the edge of the copse, we saw about fifty people gathered around a small platform. On it, between flaring torches, stood a giant who held a kettledrum beneath one arm like a tom-tom. A much smaller man, richly dressed, stood on his right, and on his left, nearly naked, the most sensuously beautiful wornan I have ever seen.

“Everyone is here,” the small man was saying, loudly and very rapidly. “Everyone is here. What would you have? Love and beauty?” He pointed to the woman. “Strength? Courage?” He waved the stick he carried toward the giant. “Deception?

Mystery?” He tapped his own chest. “Vice?” He pointed toward the giant again. “And look here—see who’s just come! It’s our old enemy Death, who always comes sooner or later.” With this he pointed to me, and every face in the audience turned to stare.

It was Dr. Talos and Baldanders; their presence seemed inevitable as soon as I had recognized them. So far as I knew, I had never seen the woman. “Death!” Dr. Talos said. “Death has come. I doubted you these past two days, old friend; I ought to have known better.”

I expected the audience to laugh at this grim humor, but they did not. A few muttered to themselves, and a crone spat into her palm and pointed two fingers toward the ground.

“And who is it he has brought with him?” Dr. Talos leaned forward to peer at Dorcas in the torchlight. “Innocence, I believe it is. Yes, it’s Innocence. Now everyone is here! The show will begin in a moment or two. Not for the faint of heart! You have never seen anything like it, anything at all! Everyone is here now.”

The beautiful woman was gone, and such was the magnetism of the doctor’s voice that I had not noticed when she left.

If I were to describe Dr. Talos’s play now, as it appeared to me (a participant), the result could only be confusion. When I describe it as it appeared to the audience (as I intend to do at a more appropriate point in this account), I will not, perhaps, be believed. In a drama with a cast of five, of whom two on this first night had not learned their parts, armies marched, orchestras played, snow fell, and Urth trembled. Dr. Talos demanded much from the imagination of his audience; but he assisted that imagination with narration, simple yet clever machinery, shadows cast upon screens, holographic projectors, recorded noises, reflecting backdrops, and every other conceivable sleight, and on the whole he succeeded admirably, as evidenced by the sobs, shouts, and sighs that floated toward us from time to time out of the dark. Triumphing in all this, he yet failed. For his desire was to communicate, to tell a great tale that had being only in his mind and could not be reduced to common words; but no one who ever witnessed a performance—and still less we who moved across his stage and spoke at his bidding—ever left it, I think with any clear understanding of what that tale was. It could only (Dr. Talos said) be expressed in the ringing of bells and the thunder of explosions, and sometimes by the postures of ritual. Yet as it proved in the end it could not be expressed even by these. There was a scene in which Dr. Talos fought Baldanders until the blood ran down both their faces; there was another in which Baldanders searched for a terrified Jolenta (that was the name of the most beautiful woman in the world) in a room of an underground palace, and at last seated himself on the chest where she lay hidden. In the final part I held the center of the stage, presiding over a chamber of inquiry in which Baldanders, Dr. Talos, Jolenta, and Dorcas were bound in various apparatuses. As the audience watched, I inflicted the most bizarre and ineffective (had they been real) torments on each in turn. In this scene, I could not help but notice how strangely the audience began to murmur while I was preparing, as it seemed, to wrench Dorcas’s legs from their sockets. Though I was unaware of it, they had been permitted to see that Baldanders was freeing himself. Several women screamed when his chain clattered to the stage; I looked covertly toward Dr. Talos for directions, but he was already springing toward the audience, having freed himself with far less effort.

“Tableau,” he called. “Tableau, everyone.” I froze in position, having learned that was what was meant. “Gracious people, you have watched our little show with admirable attention. Now we ask a bit of your purse as well as your time. At the conclusion of the play you will see what occurs now that the monster has freed himself at last.” Dr. Talos was holding out his tall hat to the audience, and I heard several coins clink into it. Unsatisfied, he leaped from the stage and began to move among the people. “Remember that once he is free, nothing stands between him and the consumination of his brutal desires. Remember that I, his tormentor, am bound now and at his mercy. Remember that you have never as yet learned—thank you, sieur—the identity of the mysterious figure seen by the Contessa through the curtained windows. Thank you. That above the dungeon you see now the weeping statue—thank you—still digs under the rowan tree. Come now, you have been very generous with your time. We ask only that you will not be penurious with your money. A few, truly, have treated us well, but we will not perform for a few. Where are the shining asimi that should have showered into my poor hat long ago from the rest of you? The few shall not pay for the multitude! If you’ve no asimis, then orichalks; if you have none, surely there is no one here without an aes!”

Eventually a sufficient sum was gathered, and Dr. Talos vaulted back into his place and deftly reaffixed the fastenings that seemed to hold him in an embrace of spikes. Baldanders roared and stretched forth his long arms as though to grasp me, allowing the audience to observe that a second chain, unnoticed previously, still constrained him. “See him,” Dr. Talos prompted me sotto voce. “Hold him off with one of the flambeaux.”