Gene Wolfe - The Sword of the Lictor

THE SUMMERHOUSE HAD boasted a solid roof, but the sides were mere latticework, closed more by the tall forest ferns planted against them than by their slender laths. Moonbeams leaked through. More came in at the doorway, reflected from the rushing water outside. I could see the fear in Cyriaca’s face, and the knowledge that her only hope was that I retained some love for her; and I knew that she was thus without hope, for I felt nothing.

“At the Autarch’s camp,” she repeated. “That was what Einhildis wrote. In Orithyia, near the springs of Gyoll. But you must be careful if you go there to return the book — she said too that cacogens had landed somewhere in the north.”

I stared at her, trying to determine whether she were lying.

“That’s what Einhildis told me. I suppose they must have wished to avoid the mirrors at theJHouse Absolute so they, could escape the eyes of the Autarch. He’s supposed to be their servitor, but sometimes he acts as if they were his.”

I shook her. “Are you joking with me? The Autarch serves them?”

“Please! Oh, please…”

I dropped her.

“Everyone… Erebus! Pardon me.” She sobbed, and though she lay in shadow I sensed that she was wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her scarlet habit. “Everyone knows it except the peons, and the goodmen and the good women. All the armigers and even most of the optimates, and of course the exultants have always known. I’ve never seen the Autarch, but I’m told that he, the Viceroy of the New Sun, is scarcely taller than I am. Do you think our proud exultants would permit someone like that to rule if there weren’t a thousand cannon behind him?”

“I’ve seen him,” I said, “and I wondered about that.” I sought among Thecla’s memories for confirmation of what Cyriaca said, but I found only rumor.

“Would you tell me about him? Please, Severian, before—”

“No, not now. But why should the cacogens be a danger to me?”

“Because the Autarch will surely send scouts to locate them, and I suppose the archon here will too. Anyone found near them will be assumed to have been spying for them, or what’s worse, seeking them out in the hope of enlisting them in some plot against the Phoenix Throne.”

“I understand.”

“Severian, don’t kill me. I beg you. I’m not a good woman — I’ve never been a good woman, never since I left the Pelerines, and I can’t face dying now.”

I asked her, “What have you done, anyway? Why does Abdiesus want you killed? Do you know?” It is simplicity itself to strangle an individual whose neck muscles are not strong, and I was already flexing my hands for the task; yet at the same time I wished it had been permissible for me to use Terminus Est instead.

“Only loved too many men, men other than my husband.”

As if moved by the memory of those embraces, she rose and came toward me. Again the moonlight fell upon her face; her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

“He was cruel to me, so cruel, after our marriage… and so I took a lover, to spite him, and afterwards, another…”

(Her voice dropped until I could hardly hear the words.)

“And at last taking a new lover becomes a habit, a way of pushing back the days and showing yourself that all your life has not run between your fingers already, showing yourself that you are still young enough for men to bring gifts, young enough that men still want to stroke your hair. That was what I had left the Pelerines for, after all.” She paused and seemed to gather her strength. “Do you know how old I am? Did I tell you?”

“No,” I said.

“I won’t, then. But I might almost be your mother. If I had conceived within a year or two of the time it became possible for me. We were far in the south, where the great ice, all blue and white, sails on black seas. There was a little hill where I used to stand and watch, and I dreamed of putting on warm clothes and paddling out to the ice with food and a trained bird I never really had but only wanted to have, and so riding my own ice island north to an isle of palms, where I would discover the ruins of a castle built in the morning of the world. You would have been born then, perhaps, while I was alone on the ice. Why shouldn’t an imaginary child be born on an imaginary trip? You would have grown up fishing and swimming in water wanner than milk.”

“No woman is killed for being unfaithful, except by her husband,” I said.

Cyriaca sighed, and her dream fell from her. “Among the landed armigers hereabout, he is one of the few who support the archon. The others hope that by disobeying him as much as they dare and fomenting trouble among the eclectics they can persuade the Autarch to replace him. I have made my husband a laughing stock — and by extension his friends and the archon.”

Because Thecla was within me, I saw the country villa — half manor and half fort, full of rooms that had scarcely changed in two hundred years. I heard the tittering ladies and the stamping hunters, and the sound of the horn outside the windows, and the deep barking of the boarhounds. It was the world to which Thecla had hoped to retreat; and I felt pity for this woman, who had been forced into that retreat when she had never known any wider sphere.

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos’s play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present. At that counter I tendered Cyriaca’s life in payment for Thecla’s. When I led her from the summerhouse, she supposed, I know, that I intended to kill her at the edge of the water. Instead, I pointed to the river.

“This flows swiftly south until it meets the flood of Gyoll, which then runs more slowly to Nessus, and at last to the southern sea. No fugitive can be found in the maze of Nessus who does not wish it, for there are streets and courts and tenements there without number, and all the faces of all lands are seen a hundred times over. If you could go there, dressed as you are now, without friends or money, would you do so?”

She nodded, one pale hand at her throat.

“There is no barrier to boats yet at the Capulus; Abdiesus knows he need not fear any attack made against the current there until midsummer. But you will have to shoot the arches, and you may drown. Even if you reach Nessus, you will have to work for your bread — wash for others, perhaps, or cook.”

“I can dress hair and sew. Severian, I have heard that sometimes, as the last and most terrible torture, you tell your prisoner she will be freed. If that is what you’re doing to me now, I beg you to stop. You’ve gone far enough.”

“A caloyer does that, or some other religious functionary. No client would believe us. But I want to be certain there will be no foolishness of returning to your home or seeking a pardon from the archon.”

“I am a fool,” Cyriaca said. “But no. Not even such a fool as I am would do that, I swear.”

We skirted the water’s edge until we came to the stairs where the sentries stood to admit the archon’s guests, and the little, brightly hued pleasure boats were moored. I told one of the soldiers we were going to try the river, and asked if we would have any difficulty hiring rowers to take us back upstream. He said we might leave the boat at the Capulus if we wished, and return in a fiacre. When he turned away to resume his conversation with his comrade, I pretended to inspect the boats, and slipped the painter of the one farthest from the torches of the guard post.

Dorcas said, “And so now you are going north as a fugitive, and I have taken your money.”