Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

The first thing I saw was the archbishop’s little black cap and his white hair under it. He was facing away from me when he came up the steps so I could not see his face. He went to the front and leaned against the low wall with his arms stiff and his hands on the top, and he looked out at the city pretty much like I had. He was saying something, but I could not quite hear what it was. Just whispering to himself.

So I edged closer until I could see his profile, and then I knew I had been right. Maybe I should have cleared my throat or something to let him know I was there, but I did not. I knew what I was going to have to do, and I was not looking forward to it.

Finally he saw me and turned to look at me, and began to say something. Only he thought better of it and shut his mouth instead.

I said, “Good morning, Your Excellency. Do I have to show you my badge?”

He did not speak, so I pulled it out of my pocket and opened it for him to see, and stuck it back in. That was when I would have noticed the hand was in there, if it was. But I did not.

I said, “You know why I’m here. You knew it as soon as you saw me. I could see it in your eyes. We caught a bunch of your people last night at the undertaker’s. Did anybody tell you?”

He shook his head, moving it just a little.

“It was pretty late. Probably they didn’t want to wake you up. Three are dead, but we got ten alive.”

I waited, but he did not say a word.

“Here I could tell you they ratted you out. Maybe I ought to. The truth is I don’t know, but if they haven’t, they will. Ten of them? Most of them women? We’ll keep after them day and night until they pass out, and go after them again as soon as we can wake them up. One will talk. Probably they all will.”

He said something too soft for me to hear, and he kept on saying it, his lips moving and moving. Pretty soon I realized there was somebody else there besides the third border guard, the archbishop, and me. Just having it there made me angry and sad and terribly down, but I kept going.

“I said I could tell you they had, but I won’t. There have been too many lies in your life already, or at least that’s how I think it must have been. Shall I tell you how I knew?”

He said, “Please do, my son. I wish you would.”

“Two things. The first was the hand. You told Naala and me that the tattoos were curses. I got someone I trust to translate a couple of them, and they were prayers.”

He did not speak.

“I guess they looked like curses to you, so that was what you told us they were.”

The archbishop said, “What was the other?”

“It was something I picked up from a priest I know. I won’t tell you his name, but he had been in a hurry to talk to you.”

I paused for a few seconds before going on.

“He knew you climbed this tower every morning, so he got up early and waited for you to come down. He told me about it, and I could see something was bothering him quite a bit. He never said what it was, so it bothered me, too. The first thing I thought of was that he was worried about your health, afraid you had a bad heart or something.”

He said, “I do.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Only if this priest had been worried about a heart attack, he would have said so.”

“Papa Zenon.”

“Right. So what else could it have been? For a while I thought it was something you told him that he couldn’t tell other people. Then I thought about the tattoos that were really prayers, and it hit me. It was the way you had looked when you came down from—”

I stopped talking because he was not paying attention. He was staring at something beside me, so I shut up and looked, too. It was my gun on the coping, stood up straight and pointed right at him. The hand had it.

Maybe I should have grabbed it. I did not. I froze, and I saw him throw his leg over the coping, moving a lot faster than I would have thought a man his age could. The rest of him followed his leg. I tried to grab him. My fingers brushed his sleeve, and he was gone. People in movies scream all the way down. He did not make a sound until he hit.

He just fell. When I looked over, I saw him way down on the pavement below, a little splash of black and a tiny dot of red beside it.

When I had gone down the first three steps I turned around and looked back, thinking I ought to remember how it had been up there, and that I would probably never go there again. The third border guard was standing at the top of the steps like he had known I would do that. He touched his forehead as if he were saluting, and it looked to me like he was smiling under his mustache.

Then he was gone.

The bad feeling I had when I was up there came down the first twenty or thirty steps with me, then I tripped on something I could not see and almost fell. After that I started saying certain things under my breath. I am not going to tell you what they were because they probably would not work for you. A lot of it was from my mother, who passed away when I was six. I still remember her, though. How pretty she was and the songs she used to sing, and some of the stories she used to tell me.

I thought by the time I got down to the ground there would be a big crowd around the archbishop, but there was nobody. I guess it was too early. I did not want to look at him and just walked away.

By the time I got back to Naala’s apartment she was up and moving around. I could hear her in there, so I tapped on the door and she let me in. She was not dressed yet, but she was wearing an old robe. She looked at me for a minute and then she said, “This is most bad, I think.”

I shrugged and went over to the chair I usually sat in and sat down.

“You are going to tell me.”

“Not now,” I said. “Later. Only yes, I’ve got to. Maybe you won’t want to report it. Maybe you will. I don’t know.”

“I must dress.” She bustled away.

After a minute or two she called from the bedroom, “We go out and get something. My green dress or the black one? Which is it you think?”

I told her to please wear the green one.

“I agree. Green is better.”

We went out, and when we had gone past several cafés, one closed and two or three already open, she said, “We walk and walk until you are ready to stop, Grafton. You must tell me then.”

I saw a café on the other side of the street that had tables outside, and pointed. “There. All right?”

She said it was.

Once we had a table she glanced at the menu, we ordered, and I had a good look around. There was nobody close enough to overhear us if I kept my voice down, so I said, “The Undead Dragon? It was the archbishop, Naala. It really was, and he’s dead.”

She drummed her fingers on the table and looked away, and looked back. Then she looked away again. Finally she said, “Tell me.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” I said. Really there was a lot, but I had decided not to tell all that. “I figured it out last night, and this morning…” I did not know how to say it. “He climbed the tower of the cathedral every morning. Remember how he told us that?”

She nodded.

“I decided to go up there and wait for him, and hit him with it when he came up. So I did. He came up, and after he had looked out at the city for a minute I came over and showed him my badge. He hadn’t seen me til then. I told him we’d picked up a bunch of prisoners last night, and they were talking.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Are they, Grafton?”

“Not as far as I know, but I said they were. Then I told him that if he came along quietly there’d be no rough stuff, but I wanted to pat him down first. When I reached out to take hold of him, he jumped.”

“From the top of the tower?”