Attractions
Almost I drowned in the delight she gave me,
for though I did not love her as I had once loved Thecla, nor as I
loved Dorcas even then, and she was not beautiful as Jolenta had
once been beautiful, I felt a tenderness for her that was no more
than in part born of the unquiet wine, and she was such a woman as
I had dreamed of as a ragged boy in the Matachin Tower, before I
had ever beheld Thea’s heart-shaped face by the side of the opened
grave; and she knew far more of the arts of love than any of the
three.
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.”
Cyriaca gave me a sidelong look. “Am I
dead then? Is that what you’re saying? You told me there was a
witch who was the necromancer, and that you only stumbled upon her
fire. I think that you yourself were the witch you spoke of, and no
doubt the sick person you mentioned was your client, and the woman
your servant.”
“That’s because I have neglected to
tell you all the parts of the story that have any importance,” I
said. I would have laughed at being thought a witch; but the Claw
pressed against my breastbone, telling me that by its stolen power
I was a witch indeed in everything except knowledge; and I
understood—in the same sense that I had “understood” before—that
though Apu-Punchau had brought it to his hand, he could not (or
would not?) take it from me. “Most importantly,” I went on, “when
the revenant vanished, one of the scarlet capes of the Pelerines,
like the one you’re wearing now, was left behind in the mud. I have
it in my sabretache. Do the Pelerines dabble in
necromancy?”
I never heard the answer to my
question, for just as I spoke, the tall figure of the archon came
up the narrow path that led to the fountain. He was masked, and
costumed as a barghest, so that I would not have known him if I had
seen him in a good light; but the dimness of the garden stripped
his disguise from him as effectively as human hands could have, so
that as soon as I saw the loom of his height, and his walk, I knew
him at once.
“Ah,” he said. “You have found her. I
ought to have anticipated that.”
“I thought so,” I told him, “but I
wasn’t sure.”