Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor

I made my way across to her as quickly as I could, pushing aside those who did not stand aside for me. (They were but few, for though not one of them thought I was what I seemed, my height made them take me for an exultant, with no true exultants near.)

The Pelerine was neither young nor old; beneath her narrow domino her face seemed a smooth oval, refined and remote like the face of the chief priestess who had permitted me to pass in the tent cathedral after Agia and I had destroyed the altar. She held a little glass of wine as if to toy with it, and when I knelt at her feet she set it on a table so she could give me her fingers to kiss.

“Shrive me, Domnicellae,” I begged her. “I have done you and all your sisters the greatest harm.”

“Death does us all harm,” she answered. “I am not he.” I looked up at her then, and the first doubt struck me.

Over the chatter of the crowd I heard the hiss of her indrawn breath. “You are not?”

“No, Domnicellae.” And though I doubted her already, I feared she would flee from me, and I reached out to catch the cincture that dangled from her waist. “Domnicellae, forgive me, but are you a true member of the order?” Without speaking she shook her head, then fell to the floor. It is not uncommon for a client in our oubliette to feign unconsciousness, but the imposture is easily detected. The false fainter deliberately closes his eyes and keeps them closed. In a true faint, the victim, who is almost as likely to be a man as a woman, first loses control of his eyes, so that for an instant they no longer look in precisely the same direction; sometimes they tend to roll up under their lids. These lids, in turn, seldom entirely close, since their closing is not a deliberate action but a mere relaxation of their muscles. One can usually see a slender crescent of the sclera between the upper and lower lids, as I did when this woman fell.

Several men helped me carry her to an alcove, and there was a good deal of foolish talk about heat and excitement, neither of which had been present. For a time it was impossible to drive the onlookers away — then the novelty was gone, and it would have been almost equally impossible for me to have kept them there had I desired to do so. By then the woman in scarlet was beginning to stir, and I had learned from a woman of about the same age who was dressed as a child that she was the wife of an armiger whose villa stood at no great distance from Thrax, but who had gone to Nessus on some business or other. I went back to the table then and fetched her little glass and touched her lips with the red liquid it contained.

“No,” she said weakly. “I don’t want it… It’s sangaree and I hate it — I — I only chose it because the color matches my costume.”

“Why did you faint? Was it because I thought you were a real conventual?”

“No, because I guessed who you are,” she said, and we were silent for a moment, she still half-reclining on the divan to which I had helped carry her, I sitting at her feet.

I brought the moment when I had knelt before her to life again in my mind; I have, as I have said, the power to so reconstruct every instant of my life. And at last I had to say, “How did you know?”

“Anyone else in those clothes, asked if he were Death, would have said he was… because he would be in costume. I sat in the archon’s court a week ago, when my husband charged one of our peons with theft. That day I saw you standing to one side, with your arms folded on the guard of the sword you carry now, and when I heard you say what you did, when you had just kissed my fingers, I recognized you, and I thought… Oh, I don’t know what I thought! I suppose I thought you had knelt to me because you intended to kill me. Just from the way you stood, you always looked, when I saw you in court, like someone who would be gallant to the poor people whose heads he was going to lop off, and particularly to women.”

“I only knelt to you because I am anxious to locate the Pelerines, and your costume, like my own, did not seem to be a costume.”

“It isn’t. That is to say, I’m not entitled to wear it, but it isn’t just something I had my maids run up for me. It’s a real investiture.” She paused. “Do you know I don’t even know your name?”

“Severian. Yours is Cyriaca — one of the women mentioned it while we were taking care of you. May I ask how you came to have those clothes, and if you know where the Pelerines are now?”

“This isn’t a part of your duty, is it?” For a moment she stared into my eyes, then she shook her head. “Something private. I was nurtured by them. I was a postulant, you know. We traveled up and down the continent, and I used to have wonderful botany lessons just looking at the trees and flowers as we passed. Sometimes when I think back on it, it feels as if we went from palms to pines in a week, though I know that can’t be true.

“I was going to take final vows, and the year before you’re to be invested they make the investiture so you can try it on and get the fit right, and then so that you’ll see it among your ordinary clothes each time you unpack. It’s like a girl’s looking at her mother’s wedding dress, when it was her grandmother’s too and she knows she’ll be married in it, if she is ever married. Only I never wore my investiture, and when I went home, after a long time of waiting until we passed close by since there would be no one to escort me, I took it with me.

“I hadn’t thought of it for a long time. Then when I got the archon’s invitation I got it out again and decided to wear it tonight. I’m proud of my figure, and we only had to let it out a little here and there. It becomes me, I think, and I have the face for a Pelerine, though I don’t have their eyes. Actually I never had the eyes, though I used to think I’d get them when I took my vows, or afterward. Our director of postulants had that look. She could sit sewing, and to look at her eyes you would believe they were seeing to the ends of Urth where the perischü live, staring right through the old, torn skirt and the walls of the tent, staring through everything. No, I don’t know where the Pelerines are now — I doubt if they do themselves, though perhaps the Mother does.”

I said, “You must have had some friends among them. Didn’t some of your fellow postulants stay?”

Cyriaca shrugged. “None of them ever wrote to me. I really don’t know.”

“Do you feel well enough to go back to the dance?” Music was beginning to filter into our alcove.

Her head did not move, but I saw her eyes, which had been tracing the corridors of the years when she talked of the Pelerines, swing around to look at me sidelong. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I suppose not. I’m never completely at ease among crowds, unless the people are my friends.”

“You have some, then?” She seemed genuinely astonished.

“Not here — well, one friend here. In Nessus I used to have the brothers of our guild.”

“I understand.” She hesitated. “There’s no reason we have to go. This affair will wear out the night, and at dawn, if the archon is still enjoying himself, they’ll let down the curtains to exclude the light, and perhaps even raise the celure over the garden. We can sit here as long as we wish, and every time one of the servers comes around we’ll get what we like to eat and drink. When someone we want to talk with goes by, we’ll make him stop and entertain us.”

“I’m afraid I would begin to bore you before the night was much worn,” I said.

“Not at all, because I have no intention of allowing you to talk much. I’m going to talk myself, and make you listen to me. To begin — do you know you are very handsome?”

“I know that I am not. But since you’ve never seen me without this mask, you can’t possibly know what I look like.”