Gene Wolfe - The Sword of the Lictor

The woman smiled a little at that. It was the first time I had seen her smile, and it made her look much younger. “Everything. A man has to do everything up here.”

“You weren’t born here then.”

“No,” she said. “Only Severian…” The smile was gone;

“Did you say Severian ?”

“That’s my son’s name. You saw him when you came in, and he’s spying on us now. He is a thoughtless boy sometimes.”

“That is my own name. I am Master Severian.”

She called to the boy, “Did you hear that? The goodman’s name is the same as yours!” Then to me again, “Do you think it’s a good name? Do you like it?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never thought much about it, but yes, I suppose I do. It seems to suit me.” I had finished shaving, and seated myself in one of the chairs to tend the blade.

“I was born in Thrax,” the woman said. “Have you ever been there?”

“I just came from there,” I told her. If the dimarchi were to question her after I left, her description of my habit would give me away in any case.

“You didn’t meet a woman called Herais? She’s my mother.”

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s a big town, I suppose. You weren’t there long?”

“No, not long at all. While you have been in these mountains, have you heard of the Pelerines? They’re an order of priestesses who wear red.”

“I’m afraid not. We don’t get much news here.”

“I’m trying to locate them, or if I can’t, to join the army the Autarch is leading against the Ascians.”

“My husband could give you better directions than I can. You shouldn’t have come up here so high, though. Becan — that’s my husband — says the patrols never bother soldiers moving north, not even when they use the old roads.”

While she spoke of soldiers moving north, someone else, much nearer, was moving as well. It was a movement so stealthy as to be scarcely audible above the crackling of the fire and the harsh breathing of the old man, but it was unmistakable nonetheless. Bare feet, unable to endure any longer the utter motionlessness that silence commands, had shifted almost imperceptibly, and the planks beneath them had chirped with the new distribution of weight.

THE HUSBAND WHO was supposed to have come before supper did not come, and the four of us — the woman, the old man, the boy, and I — ate the evening meal without him. I had at first thought his wife’s prediction a lie intended to deter me from whatever criminality I might otherwise have committed; but as the sullen afternoon wore on in that silence that presages a storm, it became apparent that she had believed what she had said, and was now sincerely worried.

Our supper was as simple, almost, as such a meal can be; but my hunger was so great that it was one of the most gratifying I recall. We had boiled vegetables without salt or butter, coarse bread, and a little meat. No wine, no fruit, nothing fresh and nothing sweet; yet I think I must have eaten more than the other three together.

When our meal was over, the woman (whose name, I had learned, was Casdoe) took a long, iron-shod staff out of a corner and set off to look for her husband, first assuring me that she required no escort and telling the old man, who seemed not to hear her, that she would not go far and would soon return. Seeing him remain as abstracted as ever before his fire, I coaxed the boy to me, and after I had won his confidence by showing him Terminus Est and permitting him to hold her hilt and attempt to lift her blade, I asked him whether Severa should not come down and take care of him now that his mother was away.

“She came back last night,” he told me.

I thought he was referring to his mother and said, “I’m sure she’ll come back tonight too, but don’t you think Severa ought to take care of you now, while she’s gone?”

As children who are not sufficiently confident of language to argue sometimes do, the boy shrugged and tried to turn away.

I caught him by the shoulders. “I want you to go upstairs now, little Severian, and tell her to come down. I promise I won’t hurt her.”

He nodded and went to the ladder, though slowly and reluctantly. “Bad woman,” he said.

Then, for the first time since I had been in the house, the old man spoke. “Becan, come over here! I want to tell you about Fechin.” It was a moment before I understood that he was addressing me under the impression that I was his son-in-law.

“He was the worst of us all, that Fechin. A tall, wild boy with red hair on his hands, on his arms. Like a monkey’s arms, so that if you saw them reaching around the corner to take something, you’d think, except for the size, that it was a monkey taking it. He took our copper pan once, the one Mother used to make sausage in, and I saw his arm and didn’t tell who had done it, because he was my friend. I never found it again, never saw it again, though I was with him a thousand times. I used to think he had made a boat of it and sailed it on the river, because that was what I had always wanted to do with it myself. I walked down the river trying to find it, and the night came before I ever knew it, before I had even turned around to go home. Maybe he polished the bottom to look in — sometimes he drew his own likeness. Maybe he filled it with water to see his reflection.”

I had gone across the room to listen to him, partly because he spoke indistinctly and partly out of respect, for his aged face reminded me a little of Master Palaemon’s, though he had his natural eyes. “I once met a man of your age who had posed for Fechin,” I said.

The old man looked up at me; as quickly as the shadow of a bird might cross some gray rag thrown out of the house upon the grass, I saw the realization that I was not Becan come and go. He did not stop speaking, however, or in any other way acknowledge the fact. It was as if what he was saying were so urgent that it had to be told to someone, poured into any ears before it was lost forever.

“His face wasn’t a monkey’s face at all. Fechin was handsome — the handsomest around. He could always get food or money from a woman. He could get anything from women. I remember once when we were walking down the trail that led to where the old mill stood then. I had a piece of paper the schoolmaster had given me. Real paper, not quite white, but with a touch of brown to it, and little speckles here and there, so it looked like a trout in milk. The schoolmaster gave it to me so I could write a letter for Mother — at the school we always wrote on boards, then washed them clean with a sponge when we had to write again, and when nobody was looking we’d hit the sponge with the board and send it flying against the wall, or somebody’s head. But Fechin loved to draw, and while we walked I thought about that, and how his face would look if he had paper to make a picture he could keep.

“They were the only things he kept. Everything else he lost, or gave away, or threw away, and I knew what Mother wanted to tell pretty much, and I decided if I wrote small I could get it on half the paper. Fechin didn’t know I had it, but I took it out and showed it to him, then folded it and tore it in two.”

Over our heads, I could hear the fluting voice of the little boy, though I could not understand what he was saying.

“That was the brightest day I’ve ever seen. The sun had new life to him, the way a man will when he was sick yesterday and will be sick tomorrow, but today he walks around and laughs so that if a stranger was to come he’d think there was nothing wrong, no sickness at all, that the medicines and the bed were for somebody else. They always say in prayers that the New Sun will be too bright to look at, and I always up until that day had taken it to be just the proper way of talking, the way you say a baby’s beautiful, or praise whatever a good man has made for himself, that even if there were two suns in the sky you could look at both. But that day I learned it was all true, and the light of it on Fechin’s face was more than I could stand. It made my eyes water. He said thank you, and we went farther along and came to a house where a girl lived.