Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor

When we rose we went to a flowing basin of silver to wash. There were two women there who had been lovers as we had been, and they stared at us and laughed; but when they saw I would not spare them because they were women, they fled shrieking.

Then we cleansed each other. I know Cyriaca believed that I would leave her then, as I believed that she would leave me; but we did not separate (though it would, perhaps, have been better if we had), but went out into the silent little garden, which was full of night, and stood beside a lonely fountain.

She held my hand, and I held hers as children do. “Have you ever visited the House Absolute?” she asked. She was watching our reflections in the moon-drenched water, and her voice was so low I could scarcely hear her.

I told her that I had, and at the words her hand tightened on mine.

“Did you visit the Well of Orchids there?”

I shook my head.

“I have been to the House Absolute also, but I have never seen the Well of Orchids. It is said that when the Autarch has a consort — as ours does not — she holds her court there, in the most beautiful place in the world. Even now, only the loveliest are permitted to walk in that spot. When I was there we stayed, my lord and I, in a certain small room appropriate to our armigerial rank. One evening when my lord was gone and I did not know where, I went out into the corridor, and as I stood there looking up and down, a high functionary of the court passed by. I did not know his name or his office, but I stopped him and asked if I might go to the Well of Orchids.”

She paused. For the space of three or four breaths there was no sound but the music from the pavilions and the tinkling of the fountain.

“And he stopped and looked at me, I think in some surprise. You cannot know how it feels to be a little armigette from the north, in a gown sewn by your own maids, and provincial jewels, and be looked at so by someone who has spent all his life among the exultants of the House Absolute. Then he smiled.”

She gripped my hand very tightly now.

“And he told me. Down such and such a corridor and turn at such a statue, up certain steps and along the ivory path. Oh, Severian, my lover!”

Her face was radiant as the moon itself. I knew the moment she had described had been the crown of her life, and that she now treasured the love I had given her partially, and perhaps largely, because it had recalled to her that moment, when her beauty had been weighed by one she felt fit to rule upon it, and had not been found wanting. My reason told me I should take offense at that, but I could find no resentment in me.

“He went away, and I began to walk as he had said — a score of strides, perhaps two score. Then I met my lord, and he ordered me to return to our little room.”

“I see,” I said, and shifted my sword.

“I think you do. Is it wrong then for me to betray him like this? What do you think?”

“I am no magistrate.”

“Everyone judges me… all my friends… all my lovers, of whom you are neither the first nor the last; even those women in the caldarium just now.”

“We are trained from childhood not to judge, but only to carry out the sentences handed down by the courts of the Commonwealth. I will not judge you or him.”

“I judge,” she said, and turned her face toward the bright, hard light of the stars. For the first time since I had glimpsed her across the crowded ballroom I understood how I could have mistaken her for a monial of the order whose habit she wore. “Or at least, I tell myself I judge. And I find myself guilty, but I can’t stop. I think I draw men like you to myself. Were you drawn? There were women there lovelier than I am now, I know.”

“I’m not certain,” I said. “While we were coming here to Thrax…”

“You have a story too, don’t you? Tell me, Severian. I’ve already told you almost the only interesting thing that has ever happened to me.”

“On the way here, we — I’ll explain some other time who I was traveling with — fell in with a witch and her famula and her client, who had come to a certain place to reinspirit the body of a man long dead.”

“Really?” Cyriaca’s eyes sparkled. “How wonderful! I’ve heard of such things but I’ve never seen them. Tell me all about it, but make sure you tell me the truth.”

“There really isn’t anything much to tell. Our path lay through a deserted city, and when we saw their fire, we went to it because we had someone with us who was ill. When the witch brought back the man she had come to revive, I thought at first that she was restoring the whole city. It wasn’t until several days afterward that I understood…”

I found I could not say what it was I understood; that it was in fact on the level of meaning above language, a level we like to believe scarcely exists, though if it were not for the constant discipline we have learned to exercise upon our thoughts, they would always be climbing to it unaware.

“Go on.”

“I didn’t really understand, of course. I still think about it, and I still don’t. But I know somehow that she was bringing him back, and he was bringing the stone town back with him, as a setting for himself. Sometimes I have thought that perhaps it had never had any reality apart from him, so that when we rode over its pavements and the rubble of its walls, we were actually riding among his bones.”

“And did he come?” she asked. “Tell me!”

“Yes, he returned. And then the client was dead, and the sick woman who had been with us also. And Apu-Punchau — that was the dead man’s name — was gone again. The witches ran away, I think, though perhaps they flew. But what I wanted to say was that we went on the next day on foot, and stayed the next night in the hut of a poor family. And that night while the woman who was with me slept, I talked to the man, who seemed to know a great deal about the stone town, though he did not know its original name. And I spoke with his mother, who I think knew something more than he, though she would not tell me as much.”

I hesitated, finding it hard to speak of such things to this woman. “At first I supposed their ancestors might have come from that town, but they said it had been destroyed long before the coming of their race. Still, they knew much lore of it, because the man had sought for treasures there since he had been a boy, though he had never found anything, he said, save for broken stones and broken pots, and the tracks of other searchers who had been there long before him.

“ ‘In ancient days,’ his mother told me, ‘they believed that you could draw buried gold by putting a few coins of your own in the ground, with this spell or that. Many a one did it, and some forgot the place, or were kept from digging their own up again. That’s what my son finds. That is the bread we eat.’”

I remembered her as she had been that night, old and stooped as she warmed her hands at a little fire of turf. Perhaps she resembled one of Thecla’s old nurses, for something about her brought Thecla closer to the surface of my mind than she had been since Jonas and I had been imprisoned in the House Absolute, so that once or twice when I caught sight of my hands, I was startled to see the thickness of the fingers, and their brown color, and to see them bare of rings.

“Go on, Severian,” Cyriaca said again.

“Then the old woman told me there was something in the stone town that truly drew its like to it. ‘You have heard tales of necromancers,’ she said, ‘who fish for the spirits of the dead. Do you know there are vivimancers among the dead, who call to them those who can make them live again? There is such a one in the stone town, and once or twice in each saros one of those he has called to him will sup with us.’ And then she said to her son, ‘You will recall the silent man who slept beside his staff. You were only a child, but you will remember him, I think. He was the last until now.’ Then I knew that I, too, had been drawn by the vivimancer Apu-Punchau, though I had felt nothing.”